Ancient Greek money

A fascinating piece in the June 19 2009 TLS by Richard Seaford. It argues that, around the end of the seventh century BCE, the ancient Greeks first invented money as coinage—at least for the West towards. By the sixth century, it had spread across the penisula. And that was the exact same century when the genres of tragedy and philosophy were invented. Indeed they first appear in the very first monetized society, Iona. For Seaford, the projection of social power onto the cosmology is to be read as a displacement of money's social power. As is the notion of the limitless, and, especially, limitless desire which inhabits tragedy, since money enables desire without limits. For Seaford, too, Greek thinking is characterized by its insistence on limits, and its notion of freedom as self-sufficiency (Aristotle) and so on. It's a repulse of coinage's ideological reach.

I will read his book Money and the early Greek mind.