38 Similar antefix found in Samos 251 (Boehlau, Aus ion. u. ital. Nekropolen)
39 Terra cotta head found on the Roman Capitol 252 (Monumenti Antichi della R. Acc. dei Lincei, XV)
40 Stone head found on the Acropolis at Athens 253 (Athenische Mitteilungen, 1879)
41 Vase in Attic black figure style found on the Quirinal 254 (Monumenti Antichi della R. Acc. dei Lincei, XV)
42 The Capitoline wolf 254 (How and Leigh, Hist. of Rome. By arrangement with Messrs Longmans Green & Co.)
43 Dipylon vase 314 (Companion to Greek Studies, Cambridge)
44 Proto-Corinthian vase 315 (Journ. of Hellenic Studies. By permission of the Council of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies)
45 Dipylon Ships 322 (Rev. Arch. XXV, 1894; Athenische Mitt. 1876; _Arch. Zeitung_, 1885; Perrot and Chipiez, _Hist. de l’Art dans l’Antiquité_)
46 Vase painting signed by Aristonothos 323 (Walters and Birch, Hist. of Ancient Pottery)
τοῖσι ἐμφανέσι τὰ μὴ γιγνωσκόμενα τεκμαιρόμενος.
HDT. II. 33.
Chapter I. Introduction
Δόξαιεν γὰρ ‹ἂν› οὐδὲν λέγειν δίκαιον οἱ διὰ τὸν πλοῦτον ἀξιοῦντες ἄρχειν.
ARISTOT. Pol. III. 1283_b_.
Φαῦλον τὸ τὰς μεγίστας ὠνητὰς εἶναι τῶν ἀρχῶν.
ARISTOT. Pol. II. 1273_a_.
[Sidenote: The seventh century B.C. is the age]
The seventh and sixth centuries B.C. constitute from many points of view one of the most momentous periods in the whole of the world’s history. No doubt the greatest final achievements of the Greek race belong to the two centuries that followed. But practically all that is meant by the Greek spirit and the Greek genius had its birth in the earlier period. Literature and art, philosophy and science are at this present day largely following the lines that were then laid down for them, and this is equally the case with commerce. [Sidenote: (a) of the first known metal coins,] It was at the opening of this epoch that the Greeks or their half hellenized neighbours the Lydians brought about perhaps the most epoch-making revolution in the whole history of commerce by the invention of a metal coinage like those that are still in circulation throughout the civilized world.
It was no accident that the invention was made precisely at this time. Industry and commerce were simultaneously making enormous strides. About the beginning of the seventh century the new Lydian Dynasty of the Mermnadae made Sardis one of the most important trading centres that have arisen in the world’s history. The Lydian merchants became middlemen between Greece and the Far East. Egypt recovered its prosperity and began rapidly to develop commercial and other relations with its neighbours, including the Greeks. Greek traders were pushing their goods by sea in all directions from Spain to the Crimea. Concrete evidence of this activity is still to be seen in the Corinthian and Milesian pottery of the period that has been so abundantly unearthed as far afield as Northern Italy and Southern Russia. It was a time of extraordinary intellectual alertness. Thales and the numerous other philosophers of the Ionian School were in close touch with the merchants and manufacturers of their age. They were in fact men of science rather than philosophers in the narrow modern sense of the latter word, and most of them were ready to apply their science to practical and commercial ends, as for example Thales, who is said to have made a fortune by buying up all the oil presses in advance when his agricultural observations had led him to expect a particularly plentiful harvest[1]. A corner in oil sounds very modern, and in fact the whole of the evidence shows that in many ways this ancient epoch curiously anticipated the present age.
[Sidenote: and (b) of the first rulers to be called tyrants.]
Politically these two centuries are generally known as the age of tyrants. The view that the prevalence of tyranny was in some way connected with the invention of coinage has been occasionally expressed[2]. Radet has even gone so far as to suggest that the first tyrant was also the first coiner[3]. He does not however go further than to suggest that the tyrant started a mint and coinage when already on the throne.
[Sidenote: The new form of government was, I believe, based on the new form of capital.]
The evidence appears to me to point to conclusions of a more wide-reaching character. Briefly stated they are these: that the seventh and sixth century Greek tyrants were the first men in their various cities to realize the political possibilities of the new conditions created by the introduction of the new coinage, and that to a large extent they owed their position as tyrants to a financial or commercial supremacy which they had already established before they attained to supreme political power in their several states.
In other words their position as I understand it has considerable resemblances to that built up in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries A.D. by the rich bankers and merchants who made themselves despots in so many of the city states of Italy. The most famous of these are the Medici, the family who gave a new power to the currency by their development of the banking business, and mainly as a result of this became tyrants of Florence. Santo Bentivoglio of Bologna passed from a wool factory to the throne. Another despot of Bologna was the rich usurer Roméo Pepoli. At Pisa the supreme power was grasped by the Gambacorti with an old merchant named Pietro at their head. At Lodi it was seized by the millionaire Giovanni Vignate. The above instances are taken from Symonds’ sixth class of despots of whom he says that “in most cases great wealth was the original source of despotic ascendancy[4].”
[Sidenote: This view deserves examination in the light of the modern financial revolution,]
Still closer analogies lie at our very door. It is a commonplace that we are in the midst of an industrial revolution. This modern movement was already beginning a century ago, when Byron pleaded the cause of the frameworkers before the House of Lords. There are of course obvious differences between the two revolutions. That of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. was mainly financial, that of the present time is mainly industrial. But the difference is not so great as it at first sight appears[5]. The invention of a metal coinage was accompanied by great industrial changes[6], and we can no more divide sharply the financial and industrial activities of the great houses of archaic Greece than we can separate the banking and the mercantile enterprises of the great families of the cities of Italy at the time of the renaissance, such as the wealthy Panciatighi of Florence, who lent money to the emperor Sigismund and exported cloths to London, Avignon and North Africa[7]. On the other hand the modern industrial movement, with its development of machinery and its organization of masters and men into trusts and trade unions, has been accompanied by a revolution in the nature of the currency. The modern financial revolution began at the same time as the industrial. [Sidenote: which has replaced metal coins by paper,] Its earliest phases are described and discussed in William Cobbett’s _Paper against Gold_[8]. Since Cobbett’s days the paper currency which so distressed him has developed enormously. Even before 1914 we were told that “Gold already acts in England only as change for notes[9].”
It is not necessary here to examine in detail the various forms taken by this new paper currency. It is enough to point out that it enables property to be transferred and manipulated far more rapidly and on far larger a scale than was previously possible[10]. Only one other point in the history of the new currency needs to be here mentioned. It cannot be better expressed than in the words used by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the House of Commons on November 28th, 1914:
I have been much struck since I have been dealing with these transactions (bills of exchange) with how little even traders who form a part of this great machinery know about the mechanism of which they form an essential part.... I do not think that the general public—and I am putting myself among them—ever realized the extent to which the business not merely of this country, but of the whole world, depended upon this very delicate and complicated paper machinery.
Apparently it needed a European war to bring home to the modern world of commerce the nature of its currency. This fact should warn us against expecting to find in early Greece any very clear recognition of the revolution in the currency that then took place. When gold and silver coins were first circulated they had a corresponding effect to the modern issues of paper. They enabled property to be transferred with greater ease and rapidity. We may be sure however that the character and possibilities of the new currency did not at once receive universal recognition[11]. The merchants in the bazaars of Lydia and Ionia who best understood how to make use of it must have profited enormously.