New-age coins and mercenaries may have brought democracy

Dr. Albaréd is a geochemist at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France. His definition of “geochemistry”, however, goes beyond the political and economic history of many. Notably, he has just finished running the European Research Council’s Silver (Silver Isotopes and the Rise of Money) project. It, by studying the isotopic composition of ancient silver coins, has tried to draw conclusions about where the metal in a coin was minted, and thus about patterns of trade.

Dr. Albared explained to the AAAS meeting how, in his opinion, the move to convert silver into small discs of more or less constant weight and purity, certified by authority, had overthrown the oligarchy of dozens of Greek city states, notably Athens, in the sixth and fifth centuries BC, and their replacement with versions of the idea that all free men should share in controlling the polity in which they live.

Both the silver and the free men, in their interpretation of the events, came from the contemporary Persian Empire’s habit of employing Greeks as mercenaries. Hoplites, the heavily armed foot soldiers who formed the core of the Greek armies of the period, were in great demand as soldiers of fortune, and many found employment in non-Greek armies—more often than not from their fellow Greeks. were fighting

Persia was a particularly large customer during its wars of expansion around the end of the 6th century, and often paid its hoplite recruits in the new medium of silver coins. These were a form of easily portable and exchangeable money invented in the kingdom of Lydia, one of the conquests of Persia, and adopted by Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire. However, many Greek city-states also began to adopt Lydia’s invention, meaning that coins were a familiar idea when these peoples returned home as wealthy, figuratively, as Croesus, the Lydian king whom Cyrus They upset the political applecart, the formation of an ambitious middle class that is a sine qua non of all successful revolutions.

Elsewhere, although the advantages of coinage were quickly appreciated throughout the Mediterranean and Near-Eastern world, this sudden influx of money and men was not something the powers-that-be were able to adjust to. But in many Greek cities the local elites could not resist the tide of silver mercenaries, and the rule of free men (though not of women or slaves, obviously – as there were no archangels yet) took over.

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