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.
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