The North Sea
domingo, 11 de febrero de 2024
Bairoch hypothesis
sábado, 10 de febrero de 2024
Gredos 092 - Séneca - Epístolas Morales a Lucilio, I (Libros I-IX, Epístolas 1-80) 274-
47
Además, fruto de esa misma insolencia, se repite este refrán: tantos son los enemigos cuantos son los esclavos. Éstos no son enemigos nuestros, los hacemos. Paso por alto, de momento, otras exigencias crueles, inhumanas, como el abusar de ellos no ya en su condición de hombre, sino en la de bestias de carga. Cuando estamos recostados para la cena, uno limpia los esputos, otro agazapado bajo el lecho recoge las sobras de los comensales ya embriagados
Otro trincha aves de gran precio: haciendo pasar su mano experta por las pechugas y la rabadilla con movimientos precisos, separa las porciones. Desgraciado de él, que vive para este solo cometido: descuartizar con habilidad aves cebadas; a no ser que sea aún más desgraciado el que enseña este oficio por placer, que quien lo aprende por necesidad.
Otro a quien está encomendada la selección de los comensales, desdichado, permanece de pie y espera a quienes el espíritu servil o la intemperancia en el comer o en el hablar les permitirá volver al día siguiente. Añade a éstos los encargados de la compra que tienen un conocimiento minucioso del paladar de su dueño, que saben cuál es el manjar cuyo sabor le estimula, cuyo aspecto le deleita, cuya novedad, aun teniendo náuseas, puede reanimarle, cuál el que, por estar ya saciado, le repugna, cuál el que le apetece aquel día. Cenar en compañía de éstos no lo soporta y considera una merma de su dignidad acercarse a la misma mesa con su esclavo. Mas ¡los dioses nos asistan!, ja cuántos de esos esclavos los tiene por señores!
Sitta von Reden - Money in Classical Antiquity
Sitta von Reden - Money in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2010)
When mutual help grew stronger and people imported what they needed and exported what they had too much of, coinage came necessarily into use. For the things that people need by nature are not easily carried about, and hence men agreed to employ in their dealings with each other something which was intrinsically useful and easily applicable to the purposes of life, for example, iron, silver and the like. Of this the value was at first measured simply by size and weight, but in the process of time they put a stamp upon it to save the trouble of weighing to mark the value (Pol. 1257a 31–8).
By a tacit concurrence, almost all nations, at a very early period, fixed upon certain metals, and especially gold and silver, to serve this purpose [of purchase]. No other substances unite the necessary qualities in so great a degree, with so many subordinate advantages… They were the most imperishable of all substances. They were also portable, and containing great value in small bulk, were easily hid; a consideration of much importance in an age of insecurity. Jewels are inferior to gold and silver in the quality of divisibility; and are of very various qualities, not to be accurately discriminated without great trouble. Gold and silver are eminently divisible, and when pure, always of the same quality; and their purity may be tested by a public authority…To the qualities which originally recommended them, another came to be added, the importance of which only unfolded itself by degrees. Of all commodities, they are the least influenced by any of the causes which produce fluctuations in value. 2
within social and normative contexts that bestow upon it, and prohibit, particular
usages.
departure from the exclusive use of precious metal as money. The shift from
precious to (some) base-metal coins was a conceptual challenge as the latter
destabilized the value of money that so far had been linked to what was assumed
to have universal value. In late-fifth-century Athens the emergency issue of
(silver-plated) copper coins provoked an outcry like a moral disaster. 14 It was
the practical solution to a pressing scarcity of silver, yet at that time raised the
question of the value of money. How far should the state (or citizens) have the
power to issue valid coins the value of which depended on political decision
rather than intrinsic value? Given that the debased coinage did circulate, there
must have been a new consensus, not acceptable to all, but generally promoted
by the collective citizen body, that monetary value could be based on political
decision rather than universal, or super-natural, qualities such as those residing
in gold and silver. The introduction of bank notes later in Western history
represents a similar transformation promoted by the combined power of state
authority and central banks. By this time, however, users had long become
accustomed to promissory notes on paper as forms of money beyond coins.
Cash-less forms of money such as transferable credit notes, cheques, or bonds,
which make possible storage and transfer of money by means of written or
electronic notification, have once again transformed notions of money, and
shifted trust in the stability of precious-metal value (e.g. Mill, above) to a rather
precarious trust in the stability of law and monetary regulation. 15
Greeks nor the Romans had a term that precisely matches our word ‘money’.
Both languages had words for coins (nomisma/nummus), or cash
(argurion/argentum: ‘silver’), but the general terms chremata (resources) in
Greek and pecunia (‘cattle money’) in Latin differed from our word ‘money’
(deriving rather arbitrarily from moneta, a cognomen of the goddess Juno in
whose temple coins were sometimes minted). The Roman jurist Iulius Paulus
(early third century AD), who for legal purposes attempted to define money,
suggests that pecunia included not just coins but omnes res, all things. Thus he writes:
The designation pecunia does not only include coinage but absolutely
every kind of pecunia, that is, every substance (omnia corpora); for
there is no one who doubts that substances are also included in the
designation of pecunia
(Dig. 50.16.178).
commonly pecunia was associated with coinage as much as money is associated
with physical currency today. Similarly, when Aristotle discusses the art of
money-making (chrematistike) he distinguishes it from another kind of
chrematistike, the art of increasing the wealth of a household (Pol. 1257b40 ff).
For clarification he calls the latter ktetike (the art of managing property) but the
two were very close. This was so because chremata did not refer just to coins,
but to all movable objects a household contained. In the Nicomachean Ethics
Aristotle describes chremata as ‘everything the value of which can be measured
in terms of coinage’ (EN 1119b26). Beyond the superficial identification of
money with coins, both chremata and pecunia were broader categories, just as
nowadays money comprises more than coins, notes and plastic cards.
opposition between value by convention and represented by the power of
governments on the one hand, and universal, sometimes supernaturally defined,
value represented by the substance of metals and useful objects on the other. As
stamped coins were money only within the boundaries of one political system,
but monetary exchange took place across such boundaries, other valuable objects
– chremata, res, merces (commodities) – had to be conceptually included into the category of money.
banking law as well as technical conditions such as widespread literacy, the print
industry, and electronic data transmission. This has created greater reliability of
monetary transactions beyond national and political boundaries and thus brought
about a notion of money that is less dependent on the intrinsic value of objects as
opposed to state authority. Instead, concepts of money depend on the market, an
(almost) global monetary network of transactions, an equally global economic
culture, and central banks that fix exchange rates of national or local currencies.
In antiquity international capital markets and international laws did not exist,
while banks were run by private entrepreneurs whose international relationships
depended on their own business contacts. State and social power over the value
and supply of money were felt more strongly, while highly exchangeable objects
were readily included into the category of money. This does not mean that Greek
and Roman money had not fully matured. Rather, different forms of economic
and political organization, conditions of transaction, monetary institutions and
forms of law suggested a narrower and at the same time broader notion of money
than is current today.
and cultural conditions, it is most strongly associated with markets and the
economy. An economy may be defined as the production, distribution and
consumption of things, each involving exchange, payment and storage of
valuable objects as well as relationships and institutions which organize these
activities. Indeed, as money has become the major means of interaction and
communication in the economy, it has also become its major signifier: any
relationship in which money is used is part of the economy, while monetary
relationships are regarded above all as economic ones.
lunes, 5 de febrero de 2024
Loss of nobility and trade
This provides the key with which to read the oft-quoted text of De officiis, where Cicero develops an argument about the respectability of professions, artificia et quaestus, which in any case no senator would practise. As Cicero says in passing, his text has nothing whatever to do with any greater or lesser latitude afforded to senators’ engaging in trade. It does not deal with them. 61 Several criteria inform Cicero’s division of activities into either base or worthy of a free man (sordidae or liberales). First and foremost is unpopularity, which taints usurers and tax-gatherers. Then there is dependency, which is all the greater when the work requires less competence. Those who have nothing to sell but the strength of their arms (operae) stand below those who at least have a skill (artes); and, to be admitted to the liberal arts, intellectual ability is required, as in architects and doctors. The problem of trade comes up twice: its first mention defines what constitutes petty commerce and why it is beyond the pale; its second, by contrast, brings large-scale trade within the pale.
In the learned portrait of the trader given by Andrea Giardina (with such talent that it must chasten anyone who would attempt to do likewise), several pages stress the radical difference between the emporos, the great trader who sails the seas, and the kapelos, the retailer or shopkeeper, which he translates into Latin as tabernarius. On this matter, the most striking text is to be found in the passage from the Life of Apollonius of Tyana mentioned in my Introduction, 62 to the effect that one of the drawbacks of maritime trade is that, in seaports, one is constrained to rub shoulders with kapeloi. 63
The latter evince none of the qualities that are estimable in traders: courage, energy, and perseverance. In Cicero’s text, the contrast is based first on social utility: those who go in for large-scale trade supply products from far away; they play a role in bringing peoples together, which, as stated above, is one of the positive effects of commerce. They tend cities, as doctors tend patients. 64 However, those ‘who buy from traders to resell immediately’ do not suffer from delays and do not effect a significant transfer of goods from one place to another. They are considered to endow goods with no added value and to render no service to anyone. Hence, the only way they can make a profit is by lying.
sábado, 3 de febrero de 2024
Cicerón - Cartas, Tomo III - Cartas a los familiares (Cartas 1-173)
(Roma, mediados o finales de diciembre del 62) 38