Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind

by Edith Hall

Coins represent timeless value, which can be divided into fractions of tiny denomination but can also be accumulated limitlessly. Coins make it possible to imagine an amount of money too huge to be spent in a lifetime. This underlies money’s connection with philosophy. Coins are different from portable chunks of bullion. The value they represent need not be the same as the value of the metal as a commodity. In extreme cases the coins may be counterfeit. In many ancient cities, coins of small denominations were issued in bronze. Their face value bore little relation to their intrinsic worth. But the slippage between the two values—the nominal and the actual—began the minute the first coin was struck in archaic Lydia. Karl Marx described this in the first volume of Das Kapital. The circulation of coins always reduces them to a semblance of the value they symbolize. What starts out as actually being made of gold, and worth the numerical weight stamped upon it, always ends up being replaced by coins or banknotes that symbolize a numerical value but are themselves physically worthless. Marx calls this process the transformation of money from “actually being gold,” Goldsein, to “appearing to be gold,” Goldschein. Coins are concrete. They are made out of matter. But they signify a quantity in the self-contained world of purely abstract symbolic value. All human labor and real-world objects can be measured by money and converted into it. This new, self-contained abstract world, ex...