What is Money?

About the lecture

In this lecture, we consider the question ‘What is money?’, focusing in particular on: (i) the status of the Greek poleis (city-states) to be the first to be thoroughly monetised as a result of the invention of coinage; (ii) the question of whether money is a thing or a relation – or both; (iii) the three functions of money: medium of exchange, unit of account and store of value; (iv) the distinction between the intrinsic value of a coin (= the value of the metal) and its conventional value (= the value of the coin); (v) the importance of confidence in ensuring the wide use of coinage; (vi) the significance of where money comes from, especially in economies (like our own) where the conventional value of money is much higher than its intrinsic value; and (vii) the insights that can be gained by considering societies that do not use money – such as that found in the Iliad and the Odyssey.

About the lecturer

Richard Seaford is a professor of the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter in England. He is the author of academic books, especially on ancient Greece, and has penned over seventy academic papers.

His work on Athenian tragedy and religion has led him to investigate the historical conditions for the radical development of Greek culture in the sixth century BC (sometimes called the origin of European culture), and to argue that a crucial factor in this development was money: the advanced Greek polis of this period was the first society in history that we know to have been thoroughly monetised.

Money and the Early Greek Mind. Homer, Tragedy, Philosophy (Cambridge 2004) explores the socio-historical conditions that made this first monetisation possible as well as its profound cultural consequences, notably the invention of 'philosophy' and of drama.

The investigation is taken further in several recent papers, for instance in ‘Money and Tragedy’ in W. V. Harris (ed.), The Monetary Systems of the Greeks and Romans (2008). His most recent book is Cosmology and the Polis: the Social Construction of Space and Time in the Tragedies of Aeschylus (Cambridge 2012). In 2005-2008 he was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust. For 2013-4 he was awarded an AHRC Fellowship for a comparative historical study of early Indian with early Greek thought.