Prominent Athenians were always borrowing money to pursue their political projects; less-prominent ones were constantly worrying about their debts, or how to collect from their own debtors.82 Finally, there is another, subtler element here. While everyday market transactions, at shops or stalls in the agora, were here as elsewhere typically conducted on credit, the mass production of coinage permitted a degree of anonymity for transactions that, in a pure credit regime, simply could not exist.
