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.83 Pirates and kidnappers do business in cash—yet the loan sharks at Aegina’s marketplace could not have operated without them. It is on this same combination of illegal cash business, usually involving violence, and extremely harsh credit terms, also enforced through violence, that innumerable criminal underworlds have been constructed ever
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