DR. LUCAS MURREY

• Lucas Murrey
• 28 October 2022
• 295
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THERE IS NO TRAGIC HERO PART 1 HISTORY OF MONEY

Seaford: “[…] the first people to have coinage are the Greeks and this allows them to be the first pervasively monetized society. Having money in the modern sense of something that is a general means of exchange, a general store of value, a general measure of value, and a general means of payment. That’s not true of pre-Greek civilizations like Egypt and Mesopotamia and so on. They do use silver to some extent as a means of exchange, but the first society to have money, to think about money and to say things about money is Greek society. And this happens from about 600 B.C. onwards which is of course the flourishing of Greek society. And if people ever ask, which they don’t often do: what allowed this extraordinary flourishing of Greek society producing the things that we are conscious the Greeks gave us like philosophy, realistic art, drama, political theory, democracy and so on and so on? then absolutely key is the invention of money. And the first society in history – with the possible exception of India and China – but the first society certainly in the Mediterranean area and in the western nation area to use money is Greek society. This is fundamental to the creation of science and Greek philosophy.

Murrey: “It’s almost as if you are saying that these extraordinary gifts of the flourishing of ancient Greece are dependent on this horrific double-edged sword.”

Seaford: “In a sense yes, it’s all very complex. But for the most part people trying to understand ancient Greece they completely ignore monetization. And my work is read outside the classics sphere. But it isn’t within the study of classics because if the people who study ancient philosophy were to admit that a social process like monetization had some relevance to what they are studying, they would lose control of their subject.

Murrey: “Right. Well, Big Education is controlled by this anonymous infrastructure that controls academia and education.

Seaford: “Yes. It’s all about the intellectual division of labor and carving yourself out a self-contained area in which you can then be a specialist. And this happens all the time in just about every academic discipline. The people who study literary text think the whole world is a text and people who study ancient philosophy are just doing philosophy and so on and so on and the real progress comes from transcending these barriers, these boundaries.

• Lucas Murrey
• 28 October 2022
• 295
• Share