Chapter 11
Voices From The Dust
Astle reviews the evidence that the supposed inventors of money, Pheidon of Argos, Servius Tullus of Rome and Lycurgus of Sparta, were not inventors but reformers. Evidence from Cedrenus, Suidas, Seneca and Julius Paulus, all indicate early forms of pure money. Pure money is not made with precious metals, but is a mere symbol of value issued by a government for use within its jurisdiction. Plato’s Laws of the Ideal Republic suggest a system where such fiat money is used within a nation and that for external necessities, for dealing with those outside of the nation, then the national treasury may be used for international exchange in treasure by agents of the nation.
A quote from Julius in the 200s A.D. is neatly done:
“Anciently money was unknown… a device was chosen whose legal and permanent value remedied by its homogeneity the difficulty of barter. This device being officially promulgated, circulated, and maintained its purchasing power, not so much from its substance as from its quality. Since that time only one consideration in an exchange was called merchandise, the other was price.”
Astle caries this narrative well if wordy, “Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Zeno all seemed to be clear on the subject.”
Though modern historians, slaves to money, want to disagree with the ancients that clay, leather and wood tokens were used as fiat currency, Aristotle is called to name the practice:
“Numisma (Money) by itself is a mere device which has value only by law (Nomos),” yet modern Numismatists, deny even the origin of their professional title and wish us to believe that only Indo-European peoples did not have primitive money of beads and shells etc.; though such shells and beads have been found in prehistoric burials, especially of kings.
Astle does a nice job of placing Troy within Hittite territory, correlating the fall of one with the other and supporting Livy and Virgil in Italians having been refugees from Troy, that the Romans were the Hittites. The word for knee, Genu, was the same, and Hittite Kuit is close to Latin Quid.
The “Athenian system of private money issue based on the fiction of precious metals or valuables reserve,” might seem far fetched for us. Thucydides relates an example of this. The ambassadors of Naxos who drew Athens into a war with Syracuse in about 415 B.C did so based on claims that their treasury held enough reserves to pay for the expedition. Once there, the Athenians found that the treasure had been exaggerated, as they had expected to find it! Why would they suggest so? Because they knew how the trick ran.
“To say that money as such began with the striking of precious metal coinage is incorrect.” It is clear that precious metal was desired for minting so that barbarians and rival powers, even enemies, beyond civic power, which was most of the world, would value the coins. Thus Romans in the 400s, being ravaged by Goths, Huns and Vandals were forever paying city ransoms in gold just as Navaho paid Apaches in corn, The entire private money grift is a way that producers can use some gold or silver to establish a fiction of vast wealth and trust, then engineer boom and bust cycles, partially through inflated money supply. This enabled the extraction of gold and silver replaced by bronze indicated in archaeological sites from late national periods through “boom” mechanics, and then acquisition of real estate during a “bust” period.
Gresham’s Law, that bad money pushes out good money, is illustrated.
A sinister note on Carthaginian mines in Spain, “show no signs of even ordinary propping and shoring,” methods show how cheap slaves were in the wake of the Greek Civil War of 430 to 400 B.C. This recalls that Athens exterminated communities that were willing to live in peace, so that the women and children could be sold, the children likely for use in poorly engineered shaft mining, as they were in England in the 1700s and 1800s.
5 Precious metal extraction events are detailed:
-1. Silver from Athens 430 thru 400 B.C., eastward
-2. Silver from Rome 100 B.C. thru A.D. 100, eastward
-3. English silver in 1666, eastward to India
-4. Silver from Russia, 1700s
-5. Vanishing of silver coin from Canada, 1967 thru 73
Prior to 560 B.C., which was the advent of the Persian Empire under its Chaldean sponsors, precious metal hoards found in Greece, were found near the mints, not widely scattered. Thus the beginning of the 250 years of war between east and West that would end in Alexander’s death. [2] The irony was, that whether in victory or defeat against the Asiatic invaders who came for their silver mines, the metal and slaves flowed east out of Greece into Asia.
The Athenians did have laws against exporting money. The problem was well known. Astle notes the problems with precious metal as a national currency:
-1. coins wore out and were hoarded
-2. hard rock mining was never profitable without slaves
-3. mine slaves died and were hard to replace unless war raged
-4. mines became exhausted
-5. in times of national calamity individuals hoarded
-6. even in peace time “captains and merchants” always extracted such an international commodity.
In short, such a precious metal money placed the internal workings of the state in the international currents, making the USG petrodollar a prime example of what is required of a state to employee an international money for internal economy.
An ominous tone is heard in this inner ear when I read of how leather and clay ancient money may be redeemed for actual precious money. Redeemed? Redemption is a religious term. Both Atens and Sparta were destroyed by the Greek All War that involved all Greek states, left at the mercy of overseas powers, just as the great European Civil War of 1914-18 left those races at the mercy of international banking powers. In the wake of the Greek Civil War, “… both population and unemployment increased, prices rose, and there was so-called ‘class struggle’ and discontent.”
Post disaster measures, after an economic event, reminds one of Covid money expansion that caused high inflation in 2021, with “donatives” and other public expenditures that put the war weary public in hock to foreign lenders.
It is suggested that Sparta and Rome seem to have been in much concord of hard spirit, due to a struggle to reform a corrupt money system.
“After Alexander there do not seem many states left in which precious metal money did not constitute the circulating medium, and therefore could not be influenced by the activities of that secret and international group of people who made the so-called Gresham’s Law very much of a reality to the undoing of rulers and their peoples.”
Astle sees Alexander as a willing tool of these conspirators. I see him as the boy king who tried to battle the conspirators and even in that struggle strengthened them. For he played the game they wrote the rules to. For a king to fight bankers is like a boxer taking on his promoter or a ball player picking a fight with the ball league. No matter how many banker fronts he smashed in liberated cities, the campaign had to be paid for by the sale of people and things, all to the increase of his ultimate and unseen foe.
The struggle between people and money was fought most bitterly in those lands were the Arуans conquered the Anatolians, where the eagle held visible power over the snake, a monster which in slaying, poisoned the very blood in the heroes veins. The primitive banker described by Astle is very much a Fagan from Oliver Twist, who was foremost a corrupter of hard poverty and honest economy.
He ends this lengthy chapter with a warning about pending genocide and world government, both still more clearly on the march, and less noticed, today, than in his day.
Notes
-1. Year of the Sin Messiah, see Robert Sephyr, 1666
-2. This is important, as Alexander was the last first rate military force to directly attack international finance until the Mongols of the 1200s and the pirates of the 1600s and 1700s. The later are revealed to have explicitly fought against banking in DeFoe’s General History of the Pyrates.
