Debt: The First 5000 Years Part 6

In ancient Greek, the word for "honor" was tme. In Homer's time, the term appears to have been used much like the Irish term "honor price": it referred both to the glory of the warrior and the compensation paid as damages in case of injury or insult. Yet with the rise of markets over the next several centuries, the meaning of the word tme began to change. On the one hand, it became the word for "price"-as in, the price of something one buys in the market. On the other, it referred to an att.i.tude of complete contempt for markets.

Actually, this is still the case today: In Greece the word "timi" means honor, which has been typically seen as the most important value in Greek village society. Honor is often characterized in Greece as an open-handed generosity and blatant disregard for monetary costs and counting. And yet the same word also means "price" as in the price of a pound of tomatoes.29 The word "crisis" literally refers to a crossroads: it is the point where things could go either of two different ways. The odd thing about the crisis in the concept of honor is that it never seems to have been resolved. Is honor the willingness to pay one's monetary debts? Or is it the fact that one does not feel that monetary debts are really that important? It appears to be both at the same time.

There's also the question of what men of honor actually do think is important. When most of us think of a Mediterranean villager's sense of honor, we don't think so much of a casual att.i.tude toward money as of a veritable obsession with premarital virginity. Masculine honor is caught up not even so much in a man's ability to protect his womenfolk as in his ability to protect their s.e.xual reputations, to respond to any suggestion of impropriety on the part of his mother, wife, sister, or daughter as if it were a direct physical attack on his own person. This is a stereotype, but it's not entirely unjustified. One historian who went through fifty years of police reports about knife-fights in nineteenth-century Ionia discovered that virtually every one of them began when one party publicly suggested that the other's wife or sister was a wh.o.r.e.30 So, why the sudden obsession with s.e.xual propriety? It doesn't seem to be there in the Welsh or Irish material. There, the greatest humiliation was to see your sister or daughter reduced to scrubbing someone else's laundry. What is it, then, about the rise of money and markets that cause so many men to become so uneasy about s.e.x?31 This is a difficult question, but at the very least, one can imagine how the transition from a human economy to a commercial one might cause certain moral dilemmas. What happens, for instance, when the same money once used to arrange marriages and settle affairs of honor can also be used to pay for the services of prost.i.tutes?

As we'll see, there is reason to believe that it is in such moral crises that we can find the origin not only of our current conceptions of honor, but of patriarchy itself. This is true, at least, if we define "patriarchy" in its more specific Biblical sense: the rule of fathers, with all the familiar images of stern bearded men in robes, keeping a close eye over their sequestered wives and daughters, even as their children kept a close eye over their flocks and herds, familiar from the book of Genesis.32 Readers of the Bible had always a.s.sumed that there was something primordial in all this; that this was simply the way desert people, and thus the earliest inhabitants of the Near East, had always behaved. This was why the translation of Sumerian, in the first half of the twentieth century, came as something of a shock.

In the very earliest Sumerian texts, particularly those from roughly 3000 to 2500 bc, women are everywhere. Early histories not only record the names of numerous female rulers, but make clear that women were well represented among the ranks of doctors, merchants, scribes, and public officials, and generally free to take part in all aspects of public life. One cannot speak of full gender equality: men still outnumbered women in all these areas. Still, one gets the sense of a society not so different than that which prevails in much of the developed world today. Over the course of the next thousand years or so, all this changes. The place of women in civic life erodes; gradually, the more familiar patriarchal pattern takes shape, with its emphasis on chast.i.ty and premarital virginity, a weakening and eventually wholesale disappearance of women's role in government and the liberal professions, and the loss of women's independent legal status, which renders them wards of their husbands. By the end of the Bronze Age, around 1200 bc, we begin to see large numbers of women sequestered away in harems and (in some places, at least), subjected to obligatory veiling.

In fact, this appears to reflect a much broader worldwide pattern. It has always been something of a scandal for those who like to see the advance of science and technology, the acc.u.mulation of learning, economic growth-"human progress," as we like to call it-as necessarily leading to greater human freedom, that for women, the exact opposite often seems to be the case. Or at least, has been the case until very recent times. A similar gradual restriction on women's freedoms can be observed in India and China. The question is, obviously, Why? The standard explanation in the Sumerian case has been the gradual infiltration of pastoralists from the surrounding deserts who, presumably, always had more patriarchal mores. There was, after all, only a narrow strip of land along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that could support intensive irrigation works, and hence, urban life. Civilization was thus from early times surrounded by a fringe of desert people, who lived much like those described in Genesis and spoke the same Semitic languages. It is undeniably true that, over the course of time, the Sumerian language was gradually replaced-first by Akkadian, then by Amorite, then by Aramaic languages, and finally, most recently of all, by Arabic, which was also brought to Mesopotamia and the Levant by desert pastoralists. While all this did, clearly, bring with it profound cultural changes as well, it's not a particularly satisfying explanation.33 Former nomads appear to have been willing to adapt to urban life in any number of other ways. Why not that one? And it's very much a local explanation and does nothing, really, to explain the broader pattern. Feminist scholarship has instead tended to emphasize the growing scale and social importance of war, and the increasing centralization of the state that accompanied it.34 This is more convincing. Certainly, the more militaristic the state, the harsher its laws tended to be toward women. But I would add another, complementary argument. As I have emphasized, historically, war, states, and markets all tend to feed off one another. Conquest leads to taxes. Taxes tend to be ways to create markets, which are convenient for soldiers and administrators. In the specific case of Mesopotamia, all of this took on a complicated relation to an explosion of debt that threatened to turn all human relations-and by extension, women's bodies-into potential commodities. At the same time, it created a horrified reaction on the part of the (male) winners of the economic game, who over time felt forced to go to greater and greater lengths to make clear that their women could in no sense be bought or sold.

A glance at the existing material on Mesopotamian marriage gives us a clue as to how this might have happened.

It is common anthropological wisdom that bridewealth tends to be typical of situations where population is relatively thin, land not a particularly scarce resource, and therefore, politics are all about controlling labor. Where population is dense and land at a premium, one tends to instead find dowry: adding a woman to the household is adding another mouth to feed, and rather than being paid off, a bride's father is expected to contribute something (land, wealth, money ...) to help support his daughter in her new home.35 In Sumerian times, for instance, the main payment at marriage was a huge gift of food paid by the groom's father to the bride's, destined to provide a sumptuous feast for the wedding.36 Before long, however, this seems to have split into two payments, one for the wedding, another to the woman's father, calculated-and often paid-in silver.37 Wealthy women sometimes appear to have ended up with the money: at least, many appear to have to worn silver arm and leg rings of identical denominations.

However as time went on, this payment, called the terhatum, often began to take on the qualities of a simple purchase. It was referred to as "the price of a virgin"-not a mere metaphor, since the illegal deflowering of a virgin was considered a property crime against her father.38 Marriage was referred to as "taking possession" of a woman, the same word one would use for the seizure of goods.39 In principle, a wife, once possessed, owed her husbands strict obedience, and often could not seek a divorce even in cases of physical abuse.

For women with wealthy or powerful parents, all this remained largely a matter of principle, modified considerably in practice. Merchants' daughters, for example, typically received substantial cash dowries, with which they could go into business in their own right, or act as partners to their husbands. However, for the poor-that is, most people-marriage came more and more to resemble a simple cash transaction.

Some of this must have been an effect of slavery: while actual slaves were rarely numerous, the very existence of a cla.s.s of people with no kin, who were simply commodities, did make a difference. In Nuzi, for instance, "the brideprice was paid in domestic animals and silver amounting to a total value of 40 shekels of silver"'-to which the author drily adds, "there is some evidence that it was equal to the price of a slave girl."40 This must have been making things uncomfortably obvious. It's in Nuzi, too, where we happen to have unusually detailed records, that we find examples of rich men paying cut-rate "brideprice" to impoverished families to acquire a daughter who they would then adopt, but who would in fact be either kept as a concubine or nursemaid, or married to one of their slaves.41 Still, the really critical factor here was debt. As I pointed out in the last chapter, anthropologists have long emphasized that paying bridewealth is not the same as buying a wife. After all-and this was one of the clinching arguments, remember, in the original 1930s League of Nations debate-if a man were really buying a woman, wouldn't he also be able to sell her? Clearly African and Melanesian husbands were not able to sell their wives to some third party. At most, they could send them home and demand back their bridewealth.42 A Mesopotamian husband couldn't sell his wife either. Or, normally he couldn't. Still, everything changed the moment he took out a loan. Since if he did, it was perfectly legal-as we've seen-to use his wife and children as surety, and if he was unable to pay, they could then be taken away as debt p.a.w.ns in exactly the same way that he could lose his slaves, sheep, and goats. What this also meant was that honor and credit became, effectively, the same thing: at least for a poor man, one's creditworthiness was precisely one's command over one's household, and (the flip side, as it were) relations of domestic authority, relations that in principle meant ones of care and protection, became property rights that could indeed be bought and sold.

Again, for the poor, this meant that family members became commodities that could be rented or sold. Not only could one dispose of daughters as "brides" to work in rich men's households, tablets in Nuzi show that one could now hire out family members simply by taking out a loan: there are recorded cases of men sending their sons or even wives as "p.a.w.ns" for loans that were clearly just advance payment for employment in the lender's farm or cloth workshop.43 The most dramatic and enduring crisis centered on prost.i.tution. It's actually not entirely clear, from the earliest sources, whether one can speak here of "prost.i.tution" at all. Sumerian temples do often appear to have hosted a variety of s.e.xual activities. Some priestesses, for instance, were considered to be married to or otherwise dedicated to G.o.ds. What this meant in practice seems to have varied considerably. Much as in the case of the later devadasis, or "temple dancers" of Hindu India, some remained celibate; others were permitted to marry but were not to bear children; others were apparently expected to find wealthy patrons, becoming in effect courtesans to the elite. Still others lived in the temples and had the responsibility to make themselves s.e.xually available to worshippers on certain ritual occasions.44 One thing the early texts do make clear is that all such women were considered extraordinarily important. In a very real sense, they were the ultimate embodiments of civilization. After all, the entire machinery of the Sumerian economy ostensibly existed to support the temples, which were considered the households of the G.o.ds. As such, they represented the ultimate possible refinement in everything from music and dance to art, cuisine, and graciousness of living. Temple priestesses and spouses of the G.o.ds were the highest human incarnations of this perfect life.

It's also important to emphasize that Sumerian men do not appear, at least in this earliest period, to have seen anything troubling about the idea of their sisters having s.e.x for money. To the contrary, insofar as prost.i.tution did occur (and remember, it could not have been nearly so impersonal, cold-cash a relation in a credit economy), Sumerian religious texts identify it as among the fundamental features of human civilization, a gift given by the G.o.ds at the dawn of time. Procreative s.e.x was considered natural (after all, animals did it). Non-procreative s.e.x, s.e.x for pleasure, was divine.45 The most famous expression of this identification of prost.i.tute and civilization can be found in the story of Enkidu in the epic of Gilgamesh. In the beginning of the story, Enkidu is a monster-a naked and ferocious "wild man" who grazes with the gazelles, drinks at the watering place with wild cattle, and terrorizes the people of the city. Unable to defeat him, the citizens finally send out a courtesan who is also a priestess of the G.o.ddess Ishtar. She strips before him, and they make love for six days and seven nights. Afterward, Enkidu's former animal companions run away from him. After she explains that he has now learned wisdom and become like a G.o.d (she is, after all, a divine consort), he agrees to put on clothing and come to live in the city like a proper, civilized human being.46 Already, in the earliest version of the Enkidu story, though, one can detect a certain ambivalence. Much later, Enkidu is sentenced to death by the G.o.ds, and his immediate reaction is to condemn the courtesan for having brought him from the wilds in the first place: he curses her to become a common streetwalker or tavern keeper, living among vomiting drunks, abused and beaten by her clients. Then, later, he regrets his behavior and blesses her instead. But that trace of ambivalence was there from the beginning, and over time, it grew more powerful. From early times, Sumerian and Babylonian temple complexes were surrounded by far less glamorous providers of s.e.xual services-indeed, by the time we know much about them, they were the center of veritable red-light districts full of taverns with dancing girls, men in drag (some of them slaves, some runaways), and an almost infinite variety of prost.i.tutes. There is an endlessly elaborate terminology whose subtleties are long since lost to us. Most seem to have doubled as entertainers: tavern-keepers doubled as musicians; male transvest.i.tes were not only singers and dancers, but often performed knife-throwing acts. Many were slaves put to work by their masters, or women working off religious vows or debts, or debt bondswomen, or, for that matter, women escaping debt bondage with no place else to go. Over time, many of the lower-ranking temple women were either bought as slaves or debt peons as well, and there might have often been a blurring of roles between priestesses who performed erotic rituals and prost.i.tutes owned by the temple (and hence, in principle, by the G.o.d), sometimes lodged within the temple compound itself, whose earnings added to the temple treasuries.47 Since most everyday transactions in Mesopotamia were not cash transactions, once has to a.s.sume that it was the same with prost.i.tutes-like the tavern-keepers, many of whom seem to have been former prost.i.tutes, they developed ongoing credit relations with their clients-and this must have meant that most were less like what we think of as streetwalkers and more like courtesans.48 Still, the origins of commercial prost.i.tution appear to have been caught up in a peculiar mixture of sacred (or once-sacred) practice, commerce, slavery, and debt.

"Patriarchy" originated, first and foremost, in a rejection of the great urban civilizations in the name of a kind of purity, a rea.s.sertion of paternal control against great cities like Uruk, Lagash, and Babylon, seen as places of bureaucrats, traders, and wh.o.r.es. The pastoral fringes, the deserts and steppes away from the river valleys, were the places to which displaced, indebted farmers fled. Resistance, in the ancient Middle East, was always less a politics of rebellion than a politics of exodus, of melting away with one's flocks and families-often before both were taken away.49 There were always tribal peoples living on the fringes. During good times, they began to take to the cities; in hard times, their numbers swelled with refugees-farmers who effectively became Enkidu once again. Then, periodically, they would create their own alliances and sweep back into the cities once again as conquerors. It's difficult to say precisely how they imagined their situation, because it's only in the Old Testament, written on the other side of the Fertile Crescent, that one has any record of the pastoral rebels' points of view. But nothing there mitigates against the suggestion that the extraordinary emphasis we find there on the absolute authority of fathers, and the jealous protection of their fickle womenfolk, were made possible by, but at the same time a protest against, this very commoditization of people in the cities that they fled.

The world's Holy Books-the Old and New Testaments, the Koran, religious literature from the Middle Ages to this day-echo this voice of rebellion, combining contempt for the corrupt urban life, suspicion of the merchant, and often, intense misogyny. One need only think of the image of Babylon itself, which has become permanently lodged in the collective imagination as not only the cradle of civilization, but also the Place of Wh.o.r.es. Herodotus echoed popular Greek fantasies when he claimed that every Babylonian maiden was obliged to prost.i.tute herself at the temple, so as to raise the money for her dowry.50 In the New Testament, Saint Peter often referred to Rome as "Babylon," and the Book of Revelation provides perhaps the most vivid image of what he meant by this when it speaks of Babylon, "the great wh.o.r.e," sitting "upon a scarlet colored beast, full of names of blasphemy": 17:4 And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication: 17:5 And upon her forehead was a name written, mystery, babylon the great, the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth.51 Such is the voice of patriarchal hatred of the city, and of the angry millennial voices of the fathers of the ancient poor.

Patriarchy as we know it seems to have taken shape in a see-sawing battle between the newfound elites and newly dispossessed. Much of my own a.n.a.lysis here is inspired by the brilliant work of feminist historian Gerda Lerner, who, in an essay on the origins of prost.i.tution, observed: Another source for commercial prost.i.tution was the pauperization of farmers and their increasing dependence on loans in order to survive periods of famine, which led to debt slavery. Children of both s.e.xes were given up for debt pledges or sold for "adoption." Out of such practices, the prost.i.tution of female family members for the benefit of the head of the family could readily develop. Women might end up as prost.i.tutes because their parents had to sell them into slavery or because their impoverished husbands might so use them. Or they might become self-employed as a last alternative to enslavement. With luck, they might in this profession be upwardly mobile through becoming concubines.

By the middle of the second millennium B.C., prost.i.tution was well established as a likely occupation for the daughters of the poor. As the s.e.xual regulation of women of the propertied cla.s.s became more firmly entrenched, the virginity of respectable daughters became a financial a.s.set for the family. Thus, commercial prost.i.tution came to be seen as a social necessity for meeting the s.e.xual needs of men. What remained problematic was how to distinguish clearly and permanently between respectable and non-respectable women.

This last point is crucial. The most dramatic known attempt to solve the problem, Lerner observes, can be found in a Middle a.s.syrian law code dating from somewhere between 1400 and 1100 bc, which is also the first known reference to veiling in the history of the Middle East-and also, Lerner emphasizes, first to make the policing of social boundaries the responsibility of the state.52 It is not surprising that this takes place under the authority of perhaps the most notoriously militaristic state in the entire ancient Middle East.

The code carefully distinguishes among five cla.s.ses of women. Respectable women (either married ladies or concubines), widows, and daughters of free a.s.syrian men-"must veil themselves" when they go out on the street. Prost.i.tutes and slaves (and prost.i.tutes are now considered to include unmarried temple servants as well as simple harlots) are not allowed to wear veils. The remarkable thing about the laws is that the punishments specified in the code are not directed at respectable women who do not wear veils, but against prost.i.tutes and slaves who do. The prost.i.tute was to be publicly beaten fifty times with staves and have pitch poured on her head; the slave girl was to have her ears cut off. Free men proven to have knowingly abetted an impostor would also be thrashed and put to a month's forced labor.

Presumably in the case of respectable women, the law was a.s.sumed to be self-enforcing: as what respectable woman would wish to go out on the street in the guise of a prost.i.tute?

When we refer to "respectable" women, then, we are referring to those whose bodies could not, under any conditions, be bought or sold. Their physical persons were hidden away and permanently relegated to some man's domestic sphere; when they appeared in public veiled, they were effectively still ostentatiously walking around, even in public, inside such a sphere.53 Women who could be exchanged for money, on the other hand, must be instantly recognizable as such.

The a.s.syrian law code is one isolated instance; veils certainly did not become obligatory everywhere after 1300 bc. But it provides a window on developments that were happening, however unevenly, even spasmodically, across the region, propelled by the intersection of commerce, cla.s.s, defiant a.s.sertions of male honor, and the constant threat of the defection of the poor. States seem to have played a complex dual role, simultaneously fostering commoditization and intervening to ameliorate its effects: enforcing the laws of debt and rights of fathers, and offering periodic amnesties. But the dynamic also led, over the course of millennia, to a systematic demotion of s.e.xuality itself from a divine gift and embodiment of civilized refinement to one of its more familiar a.s.sociations: with degradation, corruption, and guilt.

Here I think we have the explanation for that general decline of women's freedoms that may be observed in all the great urban civilizations for so much of their history. In all of them, similar things were happening, even if in each case, the pieces came together in different ways.

The history of China, for instance, saw continual and largely unsuccessful government campaigns to eradicate both brideprice and debt slavery, and periodic scandals over the existence of "markets in daughters," including the outright sale of girls as daughters, wives, concubines, or prost.i.tutes (at the buyer's discretion) continue to this day.54 In India, the caste system allowed what were otherwise differences between rich and poor to be made formal and explicit. Brahmins and other members of the upper castes jealously sequestered their daughters, and married them off with lavish dowries, while the lower castes practiced brideprice, allowing members of the higher ("twice-born") castes to scoff at them for selling their daughters. The twice-born were likewise largely protected from falling into debt bondage, while for much of the rural poor, debt dependency was inst.i.tutionalized, with the daughters of poor debtors, predictably, often dispatched to brothels or to the kitchens or laundries of the rich.55 In either case, between the push of commoditization, which fell disproportionally on daughters, and the pull of those trying to rea.s.sert patriarchal rights to "protect" women from any suggestion that they might be commoditized, women's formal and practical freedoms appear to have been gradually but increasingly restricted and effaced. As a result, notions of honor changed too, becoming a kind of protest against the implications of the market, even as at the same time (like the world religions) they came to echo that market logic in endless subtle ways.

Nowhere, however, are our sources as rich and detailed as they are for ancient Greece. This is partly because a commercial economy arrived there so late, almost three thousand years later than in Sumer. As a result, Cla.s.sical Greek literature gives us a unique opportunity to observe the transformation as it was actually taking place.

Ancient Greece (Honor and Debt).

The world of the Homeric epics is one dominated by heroic warriors who are disdainful of trade. In many ways, it is strikingly reminiscent of medieval Ireland. Money existed, but it was not used to buy anything; important men lived their lives in pursuit of honor, which took material form in followers and treasure. Treasures were given as gifts, awarded as prizes, carried off as loot.56 This is no doubt how tme first came to mean both "honor" and "price"-in such a world, no one sensed any sort of contradiction between the two.57 All this was to change dramatically when commercial markets began to develop two hundred years later. Greek coinage seem to have been first used mainly to pay soldiers, as well as to pay fines and fees and payments made to and by the government, but by about 600 bc, just about every Greek city-state was producing its own coins as a mark of civic independence. It did not take long, though, before coins were in common use in everyday transactions. By the fifth century, in Greek cities, the agora, the place of public debate and communal a.s.sembly, also doubled as a marketplace.

One of the first effects of the arrival of a commercial economy was a series of debt crises, of the sort long familiar from Mesopotamia and Israel. "The poor," as Aristotle succinctly put it in his Const.i.tution of the Athenians, "together with their wives and children, were enslaved to the rich."58 Revolutionary factions emerged, demanding amnesties, and most Greek cities were at least for a while taken over by populist strongmen swept into power partly by the demand for radical debt relief. The solution most cities ultimately found, however, was quite different than it had been in the Near East. Rather than inst.i.tutionalize periodic amnesties, Greek cities tended to adopt legislation limiting or abolishing debt peonage altogether, and then, to forestall future crises, they would turn to a policy of expansion, shipping off the children of the poor to found military colonies overseas. Before long, the entire coast from Crimea to Ma.r.s.eille was dotted with Greek cities, which served, in turn, as conduits for a lively trade in slaves.59 The sudden abundance of chattel slaves, in turn, completely transformed the nature of Greek society. First and most famously, it allowed even citizens of modest means to take part in the political and cultural life of the city and have a genuine sense of citizenship. But this, in turn, drove the old aristocratic cla.s.ses to develop more and more elaborate means of setting themselves off from what they considered the tawdriness and moral corruption of the new democratic state.

When the curtain truly goes up on Greece, in the fifth century, we find everybody arguing about money. For the aristocrats, who wrote most of the surviving texts, money was the embodiment of corruption. Aristocrats disdained the market. Ideally, a man of honor should be able to raise everything he needed on his own estates, and never have to handle cash at all.60 In practice, they knew this was impossible. Yet at every point they tried to set themselves apart from the values of the ordinary denizens of the marketplace: to contrast the beautiful gold and silver beakers and tripods they gave one another at funerals and weddings with the vulgar hawking of sausages or charcoal; the dignity of the athletic contests for which they endlessly trained with commoners' vulgar gambling; the sophisticated and literate courtesans who attended to them at their drinking clubs, and common prost.i.tutes (p.o.r.ne)-slave-girls housed in brothels near the agora, brothels often sponsored by the democratic polis itself as a service to the s.e.xual needs of its male citizenry. In each case, they placed a world of gifts, generosity, and honor above sordid commercial exchange.61 This resulted in a slightly different play of push and pull than we saw in Mesopotamia. On the one hand, we see a culture of aristocratic protest against what they saw as the lowly commercial sensibilities of ordinary citizens. On the other hand, we see an almost schizophrenic reaction on the part of the ordinary citizens themselves, who simultaneously tried to limit or even ban aspects of aristocratic culture and to imitate aristocratic sensibilities. Pederasty is an excellent case in point here. On the one hand, man-boy love was seen as the quintessential aristocratic practice-it was the way, in fact, that young aristocrats would ordinarily become initiated into the privileges of high society. As a result, the democratic polis saw it as politically subversive and made s.e.xual relations between male citizens illegal. At the same time, almost everyone began to practice it.

The famous Greek obsession with male honor that still informs so much of the texture of daily life in rural communities in Greece hearkens back not so much to Homeric honor but to this aristocratic rebellion against the values of the marketplace, which everyone, eventually, began to make their own.62 The effects on women, though, were even more severe than they had been in the Middle East. Already by the age of Socrates, while a man's honor was increasingly tied to disdain for commerce and a.s.sertiveness in public life, a woman's honor had come to be defined in almost exclusively s.e.xual terms: as a matter of virginity, modesty, and chast.i.ty, to the extent that respectable women were expected to be shut up inside the household and any woman who played a part in public life was considered for that reason a prost.i.tute, or tantamount to one.63 The a.s.syrian habit of veiling was not widely adopted in the Middle East, but it was adopted in Greece. As much as it flies in the face of our stereotypes about the origins of "Western" freedoms, women in democratic Athens, unlike those of Persia or Syria, were expected to wear veils when they ventured out in public.64 Money, then, had pa.s.sed from a measure of honor to a measure of everything that honor was not. To suggest that a man's honor could be bought with money became a terrible insult-this despite the fact that, since men were often taken in war or even by bandits or pirates and held for ransom, they often did go through dramas of bondage and redemption not unlike those experienced by so many Middle Eastern women. One particularly striking way of hammering it home-actually, in this case, almost literally-was by branding ransomed prisoners with the mark of their own currency, much as if today some imaginary foreign kidnapper, after having received the ransom money for an American victim, made a point of burning a dollar sign onto the victim's forehead before returning him.65 One question that isn't clear from all this is, Why? Why had money, in particular, become such a symbol of degradation? Was it all because of slavery? One might be tempted to conclude that it was: perhaps the newfound presence of thousands of utterly degraded human beings in ancient Greek cities made any suggestion that a free man (let alone a free woman) might in any sense be bought or sold particularly insulting. But this is clearly not the case. Our discussion of the slave money of Ireland showed that the possibility of the utter degradation of a human being was in no sense a threat to heroic honor-in a way, it was its very essence. Homeric Greeks do not appear to have been any different. It seems hardly coincidental that the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles that sets off the action of the Iliad, generally considered to be the first great work of Western literature, is a dispute over honor between two heroic warriors over the disposition of a slave girl.66 Agamemnon and Achilles were also well aware that it would only take an unfortunate turn in battle, or perhaps a shipwreck, for either of them to wind up as a slave. Odysseus barely escapes being enslaved on several occasions in the Odyssey. Even in the third century ad, the Roman emperor Valerian (253260 ad), defeated at the Battle of Edessa, was captured and spent the last years of his life as the footstool that the Sa.s.sanian emperor Shapur I used to mount his horse. Such were the perils of war. All this was essential to the nature of martial honor. A warrior's honor is his willingness to play a game on which he stakes everything. His grandeur is directly proportional to how far he can fall.

Was it, then, that the advent of commercial money threw traditional social hierarchies into disarray? Greek aristocrats often spoke this way, but the complaints seem rather disingenuous. Surely it was money that allowed such a polished aristocracy to exist in the first place.67 Rather, the thing that really seemed to bother them about money was simply that they wanted it so much. Since money could be used to buy just about anything, everybody wanted it. That is: it was desirable because it was non-discriminating. One could see how the metaphor of the p.o.r.ne might seem particularly appropriate. A woman "common to the people"-as the poet Archilochos put it-is available to everyone. In principle, we shouldn't be attracted to such an undiscriminating creature. In fact, of course, we are.68 And nothing was both so undiscriminating, and so desirable, as money. True, Greek aristocrats would ordinarily insist that they were not attracted to common p.o.r.ne, and that the courtesans, flute-girls, acrobats, and beautiful boys that frequented their symposia were not really prost.i.tutes at all (though at times they also admitted that they really were), they also struggled with the fact that their own high-minded pursuits, such as chariot-racing, outfitting ships for the navy, and sponsoring tragic dramas, required the exact same coins as the ones used to buy cheap perfume and pies for a fisherman's wife-the only real difference being that their pursuits tended to require a lot more of them.69 We might say, then, that money introduced a democratization of desire. Insofar as everyone wanted money, everyone, high and low, was pursuing the same promiscuous substance. But even more: increasingly, they did not just want money. They needed it. This was a profound change. In the Homeric world, as in most human economies, we hear almost no discussion of those things considered necessary to human life (food, shelter, clothing) because it is simply a.s.sumed that everybody has them. A man with no possessions could, at the very least, become a retainer in some rich man's household. Even slaves had enough to eat.70 Here too, the prost.i.tute was a potent symbol for what had changed, since while some of the denizens of brothels were slaves, others were simply poor; the fact that their basic needs could no longer be taken for granted were precisely what made them submit to others' desires. This extreme fear of dependency on others' whims lies at the basis of the Greek obsession with the self-sufficient household.

All this lies behind the unusually a.s.siduous efforts of the male citizens of Greek city-states-like the later Romans-to insulate their wives and daughters from both the dangers and the freedoms of the marketplace. Unlike their equivalents in the Middle East, they do not seem to have offered them as debt p.a.w.ns. Neither, at least in Athens, was it legal for the daughters of free citizens to be employed as prost.i.tutes.71 As a result, respectable women became invisible, largely removed from the high dramas of economic and political life.72 If anyone was enslaved for debt, it was normally the debtor. Even more dramatically, it was ordinarily male citizens who accused one another of prost.i.tution-with Athenian politicians regularly a.s.serting that their rivals, when they were young boys being plied with gifts from their male suitors, were really trading s.e.x for money, and hence deserved to lose their civic freedoms.73 It might be helpful here, to return to the principles laid out in chapter five. What we see above all is the erosion both of older forms of hierarchy-the Homeric world of great men with their retainers-and, at the same time, of older forms of mutual aid, with communistic relations increasingly being confined to the interior of the household.

It's the former-the erosion of hierarchy-that really seems to have been at stake in the "debt crises" that struck so many Greek cities around 600 bc, right around the time that commercial markets were first taking shape.74 When Aristotle spoke of the Athenian poor as falling slave to the rich, what he appears to have meant was that in harsh years, many poor farmers fell into debt; as a result they ended up as sharecroppers on their own property, dependents. Some were even sold abroad as slaves. This led to unrest and agitation, and also to demands for clean slates, for the freeing of those held in bondage, and for the redistribution of agricultural land. In a few cases it led to outright revolution. In Megara, we are told, a radical faction that seized power not only made interest-bearing loans illegal, but did so retroactively, forcing creditors to make rest.i.tution of all interest they had collected in the past.75 In other cities, populist tyrants seized power on promises to abrogate agricultural debts.

On the face of it, all this doesn't seem all that surprising: the moment when commercial markets developed, Greek cities quickly developed all the social problems that had been plaguing Middle Eastern cities for millennia: debt crises, debt resistance, political unrest. In reality, things are not so clear. For one thing, for the poor to be "enslaved to the rich," in the loose sense that Aristotle seems to be using, was hardly a new development. Even in Homeric society, it was a.s.sumed as a matter of course that rich men would live surrounded by dependents and retainers, drawn from the ranks of the dependent poor. The critical thing, though, about such relations of patronage is that they involved responsibilities on both sides. A n.o.ble warrior and his humble client were a.s.sumed to be fundamentally different sorts of people, but both were also expected to take account of each other's (fundamentally different) needs. Transforming patronage into debt relations-treating, say, an advance of seed corn as a loan, let alone an interest-bearing loan-changed all this.76 What's more, it did so in two completely contradictory respects. On the one hand, a loan implies no ongoing responsibilities on the part of the creditor. On the other, as I have continually emphasized, a loan does a.s.sume a certain formal, legal equality between contractor and contractee. It a.s.sumes that they are, at least in some ways on some level, fundamentally the same kind of person. This is certainly about the most ruthless and violent form of equality imaginable. But the fact it was conceived as equality before the market made such arrangements even more difficult to endure.77 The same tensions can be observed between neighbors, who in farming communities tend to give, lend, and borrow things amongst themselves-anything from sieves and sickles, to charcoal and cooking oil, to seed corn or oxen for plowing. On the one hand, such giving and lending were considered essential parts of the basic fabric of human sociability in farm communities, on the other, overly demanding neighbors were a notorious irritant-one that could only have grown worse when all parties are aware of precisely how much it would have cost to buy or rent the same items that were being given away. Again, one of the best ways to get a sense of what were considered everyday dilemmas for Mediterranean peasants is to look at jokes. Late stories from across the Aegean in Turkey echo exactly the same concerns: Nasruddin's neighbor once came by ask if he could borrow his donkey for an unexpected errand. Nasruddin obliged, but the next day the neighbor was back again-he needed to take some grain to be milled. Before long he was showing up almost every morning, barely feeling he needed a pretext. Finally, Nasruddin got fed up, and one morning told him his brother had already come by and taken the donkey.

Just as the neighbor was leaving he heard a loud braying sound from the yard.

"Hey, I thought you said the donkey wasn't here!"

"Look, who are you going to believe?" asked Nasruddin. "Me, or some animal?"

With the appearance of money, it could also become unclear what was a gift, and what a loan. On the one hand, even with gifts, it was always considered best to return something slightly better than one had received.78 On the other hand, friends do not charge one another interest, and any suggestion that they might was sure to rankle. So what's the difference between a generous return gift and an interest payment? This is the basis of one of the most famous Nasruddin stories, one that appears to have provided centuries of amus.e.m.e.nt for peasants across the Mediterranean basin and adjoining regions. (It is also, I might note, a play on the fact that in many Mediterranean languages, Greek included, the word for "interest" literally means "offspring.") One day Nasruddin's neighbor, a notorious miser, came by to announce he was throwing a party for some friends. Could he borrow some of Nasruddin's pots? Nasruddin didn't have many but said he was happy to lend whatever he had. The next day the miser returned, carrying Nasruddin's three pots, and one tiny additional one.

"What's that?" asked Nasrudddin.

"Oh, that's the offspring of the pots. They reproduced during the time they were with me."

Nasruddin shrugged and accepted them, and the miser left happy that he had established a principle of interest. A month later Nasruddin was throwing a party, and he went over to borrow a dozen pieces of his neighbor's much more luxurious crockery. The miser complied. Then he waited a day. And then another ...

On the third day, the miser came by and asked what had happened to his pots.

"Oh, them?" Nasruddin said sadly. "It was a terrible tragedy. They died."79 In a heroic system, it is only debts of honor-the need to repay gifts, to exact revenge, to rescue or redeem friends or kinsmen fallen prisoner-that operate completely under a logic of t.i.t-for-tat exchange. Honor is the same as credit; it's one's ability to keep one's promises, but also, in the case of a wrong, to "get even." As the last phrase implies, it was a monetary logic, but money, or anyway money-like relations, are confined to this. Gradually, subtly, without anyone completely understanding the full implications of what was happening, what had been the essence of moral relations turned into the means for every sort of dishonest stratagem.

We know a little about it from trial speeches, many of which have survived. Here is one from the fourth century, probably around 365 bc. Apollodorus was a prosperous but low-born Athenian citizen (his father, a banker, had begun life as a slave) who, like many such gentlemen, had acquired a country estate. There he made a point of making friends with his closest neighbor, Nicostratus, a man of aristocratic origins, though currently of somewhat straitened means. They acted as neighbors normally did, giving and borrowing small sums, lending each other animals or slaves, minding each other's property when one was away. Then one day Nicostratus ran into a piece of terrible luck. While trying to track down some runaway slaves, he was himself captured by pirates and held for ransom at the slave market on the island of Aegina. His relatives could only a.s.semble part of the price, so he was forced to borrow the rest from strangers in the market. These appear to have been professionals who specialized in such loans, and their terms were notoriously harsh: if not repaid in thirty days, the sum doubled; if not repaid at all, the debtor became the slave of the man who had put up the money for his redemption.

Tearfully, Nicostratus appealed to his neighbor. All his possessions were already pledged now to one creditor or another; he knew Apollodorus wouldn't have that much cash lying around, but could his dear friend possibly put up something of his own by way of security? Apollodorus was moved. He would be happy to forgive all debts Nicostratus already owed him, but the rest would be difficult. Still, he would do his best. In the end, he arranged to himself take a loan from an acquaintance of his, Arcesas, on the security of his town-house, at 16 percent annual interest, so as to be able to satisfy Nicostratus's creditors while Nicostratus himself arranged a friendly, no-interest eranos loan from his own relatives. But before long, Apollodorus began to realize that he had been set up. The impoverished aristocrat had decided to take advantage of his nouveau-riche neighbor; he was actually working with Arcesas and some of Apollodorus's enemies to have him falsely declared a "public debtor," that is, someone who had defaulted on an obligation to the public treasury. This would have first of all meant that he would lose his right to take anyone to court (i.e., his deceivers, to recover the money), and second, would give them a pretext to raid his house to remove his furniture and other possessions. Presumably, Nicostratus had never felt especially comfortable being in debt to a man he considered his social inferior. Rather like Egil the Viking, who would rather kill his friend Einar than have to compose an elegy thanking him for an overly magnificent gift, Nicostratus appears to have concluded that it was more honorable, or anyway more bearable, to try to extract the money from his lowly friend through force and fraud than to spend the rest of his life feeling beholden. Before long, things had indeed descended to outright physical violence, and the whole matter ended up in court.80 The story has everything. We see mutual aid: the communism of the prosperous, the expectation that if the need is great enough, or the cost manageable enough, friends and neighbors will help one another.81 And most did, in fact, have circles of people who would pool money if a crisis did arise: whether a wedding, a famine, or a ransom. We also see the omnipresent danger of predatory violence that reduces human beings to commodities, and by doing so introduces the most cutthroat kinds of calculation into economic life-not just on the part of the pirates, but even more so, perhaps, on those moneylenders lurking by the market offering stiff credit terms to anyone who came to ransom their relatives but found themselves caught short, and who then could appeal to the state to allow them to hire men with weapons to enforce the contract. We see heroic pride, which sees too great an act of generosity as itself a kind of belittling a.s.sault. We see the ambiguity among gifts, loans, and commercial credit arrangements. Neither does the way things played out in this case seem particularly unusual, except perhaps for Nicostratus's extraordinarily ingrat.i.tude. Prominent Athenians were always borrowing money to pursue their political projects; less-prominent ones were constantly worrying about their debts, or how to collect from their own debtors.82 Finally, there is another, subtler element here. While everyday market transactions, at shops or stalls in the agora, were here as elsewhere typically conducted on credit, the ma.s.s production of coinage permitted a degree of anonymity for transactions that, in a pure credit regime, simply could not exist.83 Pirates and kidnappers do business in cash-yet the loan sharks at Aegina's marketplace could not have operated without them. It is on this same combination of illegal cash business, usually involving violence, and extremely harsh credit terms, also enforced through violence, that innumerable criminal underworlds have been constructed ever since.

In Athens, the result was extreme moral confusion. The language of money, debt, and finance provided powerful-and ultimately irresistible-ways to think about moral problems. Much as in Vedic India, people started talking about life as a debt to the G.o.ds, of obligations as debts, about literal debts of honor, of debt as sin and of vengeance as debt collection.84 Yet if debt was morality-and certainly at the very least it was in the interest of creditors, who often had little legal recourse to compel debtors to pay up, to insist that it was-what was one to make of the fact that money, that very thing that seemed capable of turning morality into an exact and quantifiable science, also seemed to encourage the very worst sorts of behavior?

It is from such dilemmas that modern ethics and moral philosophy begin. I think this is true quite literally. Consider Plato's Republic, another product of fourth-century Athens. The book begins when Socrates visits an old friend, a wealthy arms manufacturer, at the port of Piraeus. They get into a discussion of justice, which begins when the old man proposes that money cannot be a bad thing, since it allows those who have it to be just, and that justice consists in two things: telling the truth, and always paying one's debts.85 The proposal is easily demolished. What, Socrates asks, if someone lent you his sword, went violently insane, and then asked for it back (presumably, so he could kill someone)? Clearly it can never be right to arm a lunatic whatever the circ.u.mstances.86 The old man cheerfully shrugs the problem off and heads off to attend to some ritual, leaving his son to carry on the argument.

The son, Polemarchus, switches gears: clearly his father hadn't meant "debt" in the literal sense of returning what one has borrowed. He meant it more in the sense of giving people what is owed to them; repaying good with good and evil with evil; helping one's friends and hurting one's enemies. Demolishing this one takes a little more work (are we saying justice plays no part in determining who one's friends and enemies are? If so, wouldn't someone who decided he had no friends, and therefore tried to hurt everyone, be a just man? And even if you did have some way to say for certain that one's enemy really is an intrinsically bad person and deserves harm, by harming him, do you not thus make him worse? Can turning bad people into even worse people really be an example of justice?) but it is eventually accomplished. At this point a Sophist, Thrasymachos, enters and denounces all of the debaters as milky-eyed idealists. In reality, he says, all talk of "justice" is mere political pretext, designed to justify the interests of the powerful. And so it should be, because insofar as justice exists, it is simply that: the interest of the powerful. Rulers are like shepherds. We like to think of them as benevolently tending their flocks, but what do shepherds ultimately do with sheep? They kill and eat them, or sell the meat for money. Socrates responds by pointing out that Thrasymachos is confusing the art of tending sheep with the art of profiting from them. The art of medicine aims to improve health, whether or not doctors get paid for practicing it. The art of shepherding aims to ensure the well-being of sheep, whether or not the shepherd (or his employer) is also a businessman who knows how to extract a profit from them. Just so with the art of governance. If such an art exists, it must have its own intrinsic aim apart from any profit one might also get from it, and what can this be other than the establishment of social justice? It's only the existence of money, Socrates suggests, that allows us to imagine that words like "power" and "interest" refer to universal realities that can be pursued in their own right, let alone that all pursuits are really ultimately the pursuit of power, advantage, or self-interest.87 The question, he said, is how to ensure that those who hold political office will do so not for gain, but rather for honor.

I will leave off here. As we all know, Socrates eventually gets around to offering some political proposals of his own, involving philosopher kings; the abolition of marriage, the family, and private property; selective human breeding boards. (Clearly, the book was meant to annoy its readers, and for more than two thousand years, it has succeeded brilliantly.) What I want to emphasize, though, is the degree to which what we consider our core tradition of moral and political theory today springs from this question: What does it mean to pay our debts? Plato presents us first with the simple, literal businessman's view. When this proves inadequate, he allows it to be reframed in heroic terms. Perhaps all debts are really debts of honor after all.88 But heroic honor no longer works in a world where (as Apollodorus sadly discovered) commerce, cla.s.s, and profit have so confused everything that peoples' true motives are never clear. How do we even know who our enemies are? Finally, Plato presents us with cynical realpolitik. Maybe n.o.body really owes anything to anybody. Maybe those who pursue profit for its own sake have it right after all. But even that does not hold up. We are left with a certainty that existing standards are incoherent and self-contradictory, and that some sort of radical break would be required in order to create a world that makes any logical sense. But most of those who seriously consider a radical break along the lines that Plato suggested have come to the conclusion that there might be far worse things than moral incoherence. And there we have stood, ever since, in the midst of an insoluble dilemma.

It's not surprising that these issues weighed on Plato's mind. Not seven years before, he had taken an ill-fated sea cruise and wound up being captured and, supposedly like Nicostratus, offered for sale on the auction block at Aegina. However, Plato had better luck. A Libyan philosopher of the Epicurean school, one Annikeris, happened to be in the market at the time. He recognized Plato and ransomed him. Plato felt honor-bound to try to repay him, and his Athenian friends a.s.sembled twenty minas in silver with which to do so, but Annikeris refused to accept the money, insisting that it was his honor to be able to benefit a fellow lover of wisdom.89 As indeed it was: Annikeris has been remembered, and celebrated, for his generosity ever since. Plato went on to use the twenty minas to buy land for a school, the famous Academy. And while he hardly showed the same ingrat.i.tude as Nicostratus, one does rather get the impression that even Plato wasn't especially happy about the fact that his subsequent career was, in a sense, made possible by his debt to a man who he probably considered an extremely minor philosopher-and Annikeris wasn't even Greek! At least this would help explain why Plato, otherwise the inveterate name-dropper, never mentioned Annikeris. We know of his existence only from later biographers.90

Ancient Rome (Property and Freedom).

If Plato's work testifies to how profoundly the moral confusion introduced by debt has shaped our traditions of thought, Roman law reveals how much it has shaped even our most familiar inst.i.tutions.

German legal theorist Rudolf von Jhering famously remarked that ancient Rome had conquered the world three times: the first time through its armies, the second through its religion, the third through its laws.91 He might have added: each time more thoroughly. The Empire, after all, only spanned a tiny portion of the globe; the Roman Catholic Church has spread farther; Roman law has come to provide the language and conceptual underpinnings of legal and const.i.tutional orders everywhere. Law students from South Africa to Peru are expected to spend a good deal of their time memorizing technical terms in Latin, and it is Roman law that provides almost all our basic conceptions about contract, obligation, torts, property, and jurisdiction-and, in a broader sense, of citizenship, rights, and liberties on which political life, too, is based.

This was possible, Jhering held, because, the Romans were the first to turn jurisprudence into a genuine science. Perhaps-but for all that, it remains true that Roman law has a few notoriously quirky features, some so odd that they have confused and confounded jurists ever since Roman law was revived in Italian universities in the High Middle Ages. The most notorious of these is the unique way it defines property. In Roman law, property, or dominium, is a relation between a person and a thing, characterized by absolute power of that person over that thing. This definition has caused endless conceptual problems. First of all, it's not clear what it would mean for a human to have a "relation" with an inanimate object. Human beings can have relations with one another. But what would it mean to have a "relation" with a thing? And if one did, what would it mean to give that relation legal standing? A simple ill.u.s.tration will suffice: imagine a man trapped on a desert island. He might develop extremely personal relationships with, say, the palm trees growing on that island. If he's there too long, he might well end up giving them all names and spending half his time having imaginary conversations with them. Still, does he own them? The question is meaningless. There's no need to worry about property rights if noone else is there.

Clearly, then, property is not really a relation between a person and a thing. It's an understanding or arrangement between people concerning things. The only reason that we sometimes fail to notice this is that in many cases-particularly when we are talking about our rights over our shoes, or cars, or power tools-we are talking of rights held, as English law puts it, "against all the world"-that is, understandings between ourselves and everyone else on the planet, that they will all refrain from interfering with our possessions, and therefore allow us to treat them more or less any way we like. A relation between one person and everyone else on the planet is, understandably, difficult to conceive as such. It's easier to think of it as a relationship with a thing. But even here, in practice this freedom to do as one likes turns out to be fairly limited. To say that the fact that I own a chainsaw gives me an "absolute power" to do anything I want with it is obviously absurd. Almost anything I might think of doing with a chainsaw outside my own home or land is likely to be illegal, and there are only a limited number of things I can really do with it inside. The only thing "absolute" about my rights to a chainsaw is my right to prevent anyone else from using it.92 Nonetheless, Roman law does insist that the basic form of property is private property, and that private property is the owner's absolute power to do anything he wants with his possessions. Twelfth-century Medieval jurists came to refine this into three principles, usus (use of the thing), fructus (fruits, i.e., enjoyment of the products of the thing), and abusus (abuse or destruction of the thing), but Roman jurists weren't even interested in specifying that much, since in a certain way, they saw the details as lying entirely outside the domain of law. In fact, scholars have spent a great deal of time debating whether Roman authors actually considered private property to be a right (ius),93 for the very reason that rights were ultimately based on agreements between people, and one's power to dispose of one's property was not: it was just one's natural ability to do whatever one pleased when social impediments were absent.94 If you think about it, this really is an odd place to start in developing a theory of property law. It is probably fair to say that, in any part of the world, in any period of history, whether in ancient j.a.pan or Machu Picchu, someone who had a piece of string was free to twist it, knot it, pull it apart, or toss it in the fire more or less as they had a mind to. Nowhere else did legal theorists appear to have found this fact in any way interesting or important. Certainly no other tradition makes it the very basis of property law-since, after all, doing so made almost all actual law little more than a series of exceptions.

How did this come about? And why? The most convincing explanation I've seen is Orlando Patterson's: the notion of absolute private property is really derived from slavery. One can imagine property not as a relation between people, but as a relation between a person and a thing, if one's starting point is a relation between two people, one of whom is also a thing. (This is how slaves were defined in Roman law: they were people who were also a res, a thing.)95 The emphasis on absolute power begins to make sense as well.96 The word dominium, meaning absolute private property, was not particularly ancient.97 It only appears in Latin in the late Republic, right around the time when hundreds of thousands of captive laborers were pouring into Italy, and when Rome, as a consequence, was becoming a genuine slave society.98 By 50 bc, Roman writers had come to simply a.s.sume that workers-whether the farmworkers harvesting peas in countryside plantations, the muleteers delivering those peas to shops in the city, or the clerks keeping count of them-were someone else's property. The existence of millions of creatures who were simultaneously persons and things created endless legal problems, and much of the creative genius of Roman law was spent in working out the endless ramifications. One need only flip open a casebook of Roman law to get a sense of these. This is from the second-century jurist Ulpian: Again, Mela writes that if some persons were playing ball and one of them, hitting the ball quite hard, knocked it against a barber's hands, and in this way the throat of a slave, whom the barber was shaving, was cut by a razor pressed against it, then who is the person with whom the culpability lay is liable under the Lex Aquilia [the law of civil damages]? Proclus says that the culpability lies with the barber; and indeed, if he was shaving at a place where games are normally played or where traffic was heavy, there is reason to fault him. But it would not be badly held that if someone entrusts himself to a barber who has a chair in a dangerous place, he should have himself to blame.99 In other words, the master cannot claim civil damages against the ballplayers or barber for destroying his property if the real problem was that he bought a stupid slave. Many of these debates might strike us as profoundly exotic (could you be accused of theft for merely convincing a slave to run away? If someone killed a slave who was also your son, could you take your sentimental feelings toward him into account in a.s.sessing damages, or would you have to stick to his market value?)-but our contemporary tradition of jurispruden