The invention of coinage in ancient Greece provided an arena in which
rival political groups struggled to imprint their views on the world.
Here Leslie Kurke analyzes the ideological functions of Greek coinage as
one of a number of symbolic practices that arise for the first time in
the archaic period. By linking the imagery of metals and coinage to
stories about oracles, prostitutes, Eastern tyrants, counterfeiting,
retail trade, and games, she traces the rising egalitarian ideology of
the polis, as well as the ongoing resistance of an elitist tradition to
that development. The argument thus aims to contribute to a Greek
"history of ideologies," to chart the ways ideological contestation
works through concrete discourses and practices long before the
emergence of explicit political theory.
To an elitist sensibility, the use of almost pure silver stamped with
the state's emblem was a suspicious alternative to the para-political
order of gift exchange. It ultimately represented the undesirable
encroachment of the public sphere of the egalitarian polis. Kurke
re-creates a "language of metals" by analyzing the stories and practices
associated with coinage in texts ranging from Herodotus and archaic
poetry to Aristotle and Attic inscriptions. She shows that a wide
variety of imagery and terms fall into two opposing symbolic domains:
the city, representing egalitarian order, and the elite symposium, a
kind of anti-city. Exploring the tensions between these domains, Kurke
excavates a neglected portion of the Greek cultural "imaginary" in all
its specificity and strangeness.
