Money, law and exchange: coinage in the Greek Polis

Abstract

It has long been recognised that money is both a reality and an ideology. Yet the interaction between the two, the extent to which all-purpose money, in ancient Greece first realised in the use of coinage, brings about particular ideologies of value and exchange, while at the same time being framed by them, rarely comes into focus. Like literacy, money has frequently been taken as a culturally independent cause for particular effects both at the social and economic as well as the ideological level. In this paper I wish to complicate the story of monetization by relating its ideological superstructure in the Greek polis to the particular institutions in which it circulated.