What did “barter” mean in ancient societies? Back at the times when men organized themselves in simple societies, people exchanged things, products, goods, in order to satisfy a vital need: if one had something extra and didn’t have something necessary to live, then it is necessary to exchange with someone else. This is a very objective side of exchange, in which services and things that are necessary to survive circulate among the most diverse groups or individuals.
Although the character of bartering has its meaning directly related to needs, and this type of exchange has been carried out since ancient times, in Antiquity many exchanges were imbued with symbolism and the goods that went from one to another were not always intended to meet a vital need.
In the ancient Mediterranean, many exchanges took place, for example, to meet the prestige standards of certain social groups. In the Greek Iron Age, between the 9th and 7th centuries BC, there were specific materials – mainly gold and bronze – that could circulate only among the warrior elite, not specifically Greek. Brass and golden cauldrons, cups, spears, belts, and weapons were exchanged between Greeks and non-Greeks as gifts and counter-gifts with which this powerful elite accumulated a wealthy reserve.1 A contact and identity network were then created between those who were Greeks and those who were not. A simple peasant had no access to this essentially personal type of exchange. Therefore, those exchanges mark and create specific identities that go far beyond a demand or a basic need.
Another type of exchange took place between the divine and human spheres: one example of this activity is the numerous votive offerings in shrines dedicated to the gods. These are exchanges that sometimes surprise us because a great deal of wealth is immobilised as gifts to the gods in the expectation of receiving a grace in return.
In Greek and Roman antiquity exchanges were carried out in many ways. However, it was important to know if the exchange was indispensable or not, because in order to make an exchange, a form of reciprocity and value attribution to goods and services should exist. How can one exchange a plantation plot for an ox? Or a slave for a bronze cauldron? Which one is more worthy? How does one establish an equivalence between the grace of a deity and the gift received at the shrine? Does mere need measure that value? Sometimes it might, but how would one measure necessity? Because of that, according to each location, abstract measures of value were gradually stipulated at the time, in order to measure the item of the exchange (material goods or not). The ox was one of those measures, such as the salt (indispensable in preserving food) and heavy bronze2 Once one did not go to the market with an ox, the weight of metal and the sacks of salt were an abstract reference.
Around the tenth century BC, among Mediterranean societies, the metal began to prevail as the preferred commodity for equivalence’s making in all kinds of exchange: it is malleable, divisible, and used to produce useful tools, especially in the case of bronze.
The metal as exchanges’ intermediaries being valorized in ancient Mediterranean comes from a long Eastern tradition known from ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian documents.3 Depending on the place, silver or bronze was even more valued. Gold was always left aside for special prestigious exchanges such as gifts between elite members. Metal objects with standardized shapes and weights began to appear in the Mediterranean to facilitate the achievement of equivalences which was useful for long-distance exchanges or for wealth accumulation. Such objects are described, for instance, in Homeric poems: cauldrons and tripods. Others were discovered in shipwrecks, such as bronze pieces shaped like ox skins. Still, other metals were excavated in sanctuaries and temples because of the exchanges with the gods, such as iron rods used in “barbecues”, the obeloi in Greek.4 Archaeology has revealed throughout the Mediterranean in various eras ranging from the eleventh to the fifth century B.C. numerous other objects which performed the function of mediating exchanges, serving as an abstract reference value for building equivalences or even used in the act of exchange. Examples of this are bronze threads and rings, springs, blunt arrowheads and so on.
In the search for the perfecting of more exact equivalences, a universal object of positive value arose: the coin minted in metal. In Greek, nómisma. Money that had an enormous potential of serving to intermediate exchanges in an impersonal way, disconnected from any other norm but the very weight of the metal contained in the coin and guaranteed by an issuing authority; money that could lend itself to accumulation beyond necessity; money that registered the equivalence of any goods or services between any partners, promoting impersonal exchanges, totally disconnected from specific social groups. All the potential offered by this new instrument of exchange was developed in a very long process in the Mediterranean. A process that was also very heterogeneous depending on the many communities that shared the Mediterranean area in antiquity.
Thanks to the archeological excavations we know that the first metals coins were created from oriental traditions, in locations and cities inserted in the Greek context on the coast of today’s Turkey, during the second half of the 7th c. BC. Afterwards, during the 6th century BC, coins were gradually adopted by cities in Balkan Greece – such as Aegina, Athens and Corinth in the first instance –, and by many other cities in the Mediterranean. But it was not always linked to trade, but to the strict exchange of material goods. Since the beginning, coins incorporated an important symbolic value related to the religiosity that permeated all ancient societies’ life spheres. Moreover, those tiny metallic objects were surprising: as if by magic they could transform themselves into other things during the act of making a purchase. They contained within themselves a magical value to which ancient people were very sensitive.5 Actually, wealth has always been closely associated with religious, symbolic, magical spheres, and social groups in charge of rituals and sacred crafts.6 The creation of money also reflect the social, political and economic structure constituted among the Greeks in the Mediterranean: the polis – an independent Greek city with its own identity – was linked to foundation myths in which powerful divine entities were involved. Back then in the polis, the issuing authority maintained an identity related to heroes and divinities, so that the images stamped on the coins of the archaic and classical period (7th – 4th century BC) could always be referred to protective divinities to equalize the power of the city with the sacred one, that is why the coins of Athens have the effigy if the goddess Athena. Other cities made use of images of geographical features, such as nymphs – providers of water and indispensable for survival –. Even if others have chosen to represent mythical heroes involved in their respective foundations, such as Taras riding a dolphin on the coins of Taranto. Therefore, Greek coins are always related to aspects of the ancestral legitimacy of the existence of the group that represent them.
(Numismatic Collection in the Museu Paulista, University of São Paulo – Brazil).
It can be stated with some certainty that until the fifth century, most coins struck by Greeks had much more to do with identity and symbolism than with the exchange of goods or trade. In any case, coins implied a new way of assessing wealth: it becomes more visible and potentially more diffused among different social classifications. Currency could make all goods and services to be exchanged in a precise equivalent way, since it is one of the outstanding elements of Greek rationality.7 Until the fifth century, its transformative potential – capable of depersonalizing human relations in a trade context – had not developed homogeneously throughout Mediterranean Hellenism yet.
The basic elements launched by the Greek – such as creation and diffusion of monetary coinage – were maintained in the following centuries: during the Hellenistic period and the Roman era. Coins have always represented the issuing authorities: the power they hold, their legitimacy based in ancestry, their relationship with supernatural spheres, their portability and divisibility allowing a greater wealth distribution among different social groups, it becomes a facilitator of exchanges and impersonal relationships.
The enormous potential of money as a transformer of social relations through exchange gained vigorous momentum during the Hellenistic period and during the period of Roman domination in the Mediterranean. This impulse was favoured by the issue of coins destined to pay the wages of mercenaries. In the hands of mercenaries, coins were used for every kind of exchange: circulating wealth that bought food, clothes and also served for accumulation. Even so, the link of monetary coinage with religious or mythical elements was always present in the coins of antiquity. Alexander the Great, for example, never dared to put his own effigy on a coin. He disguised himself as Heracles. The portrait of a still living ruler appeared for the first time only in the 1st century BC on a coin of Julius Caesar.
And even the Roman Emperors equated their power and that of their family with divine powers, represented on their coins by crowns, inscriptions and effigies of the Emperor and Empresses as personifications of typically divine energies such as Health, Justice, Prudence and many others.
References
- Balmuth, M., ed., 2001: Hacksilber to coinage: new insights into the monetary history of Near East and Greece, The American Numismatic Society, New York.
- Bayet, J., 1959: “L’expression des énergies divines dans les monnayages des grecs”, MEFR, 71, p. 65-106.
- Einzig, P., 1966: Primitive Money. In its ethnological, historical and economic aspects, New York.
- Florenzano, M.B.B., 1999: “Measuring valuables: coins in the Greek Polis”, Revue des archéologues et d’historiens d’art de Louvain, 32, p. 103-107.
- Florenzano, M.B.B., 2000: Entre Reciprocidade e Mercado: A moeda na Grécia Antiga, Tese de Livre-docência, Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia da USP, São Paulo. URL: https://www.academia.edu/11853191/Entre_Reciprocidade_e_Mercado_a_moeda_na_Gr%C3%A9cia_Antiga
- Gernet, L., 1948):“La notion mythique de la valeur en Grèce”, Journal de Psychologie, 41, oct.-dec., p. 415-462.
- Grandjean, C. & Moustaka, A., ed., 2012: Aux origines de la monnaie fiduciaire. Traditions métallurgiques et innovations numismatiques. Actes de l’atelier international de 16-17 novembre 2012 à Tours, Ausonius éditions Scripta Antiqua 55, Paris, p. 81-96.
- Parise, N., 1992: Nascita della moneta e forme arcaiche dello scambio, Roma. Servet, J.-M., 1984: Nomismata. État et Origines de la Monnaie, Lyon.
