Economics, Money and Markets

An Athenian farmer is being eaten alive by the debts his horse-mad son runs up, and he has heard there is a school next door where they teach you to argue your way out of anything. He enrolls, fails — he is too old and cannot hold a thought — and sends the son instead. The son learns beautifully. He comes home, wins an argument that beating your father is just, and offers to prove that beating your mother follows. The father burns the school down. The head of the school, hanging in a basket studying the sun and denying that Zeus exists, is a man named Socrates, who was in his forties, alive in the city, and had another twenty-four years to live.

Cicero tells his student son which ways of earning a living a gentleman may admit to. Tax collectors and money-lenders are beneath contempt, shopkeepers cannot profit without lying, and wholesale trade is nearly respectable — provided you get out of it and buy land. Sixteen centuries of European feeling about commerce start here.

Four men walk home from the docks after gawping at an enormous Egyptian grain freighter and fall to wishing aloud — for money, for an empire, for a ring that grants anything. Each fantasy is allowed to run until it collapses under its own weight.

Athens has lost her empire and the income with it, and the obvious remedy is to squeeze the remaining allies harder. Xenophon, near eighty, argues instead that the city is sitting on assets it has never counted: silver under Laurium, the best harbour in Greece, and a resident foreign population it taxes for the privilege of staying.

In 195 BCE the women of Rome block the streets to demand repeal of a law capping how much gold a woman may own and what she may wear. Cato argues that giving way ends the republic. He loses. The fullest ancient argument about women, property and public luxury.

Rome, 33 CE. A forgotten law against usury is suddenly enforced, every lender calls in his loans at once, land is dumped on the market and prices collapse. Tiberius ends it with a hundred million sesterces of interest-free credit. The fullest account of a financial panic to survive from antiquity.

A working sailing manual for the Indian Ocean run, and almost the only one to survive: every port from Egypt to the Ganges in the order a ship meets them, who controls it, what to bring and what to take away. No narrator, no wonders — just harbours, goods and prices.

Athens in about 594 BCE was close to civil war: the poor were mortgaged to the rich, and those who defaulted were being sold abroad as slaves. Solon was given power to write the laws and used it to void every debt at a stroke, free the enslaved, and forbid lending on the security of a person ever again. Then he left the country for ten years so nobody could ask him to change anything.