PERGAMUM AND PITANE

Aristotle, author of some lucid thinking on the subject of money, if not ruthlessly penetrative, was himself married to the niece of a banker installed as co-tyrant (or "Front Man") with another such tyrant-banker...

"(Hermias the Tyrant of Assos and Atarneus) was a eunuch slave of a certain banker: he went to Athens and attended the lectures of Plato and Aristotle, and returning, he shared the tyranny of his master who had previously secured the places around Atarneus and Assos. Subsequently he succeeded him and sent for Aristotle and married his niece to him...⁽¹⁾

...In this slave, banker, philosopher and despot Leaf ⁽²⁾ sees a tyrant who owed his position to his wealth. He quotes Euaion, the pupil of Plato, who, not far to the North at Lampsacus 'lent money to the city on security of the Acropolis, and when the city defaulted, wanted to become a tyrant'..."⁽³⁾

While bankers in the present dream of entrapping the whole world via their "United Nations", in the past they contented themselves with the entrapping of a city!... Just as in the present they create an entirely false picture of the nature of their operations and carefully promote the legend they are lending the public's money, so they did in antiquity, we may rest assured. No doubt they spread exactly the same story in the time of the tyrants, and people in that day, understanding no more about money than they do today, believed it ⁽⁴⁾...

 

The following may be accepted as instance of their activities in ancient times.

...Pergamum, that city that arose in South West Asia Minor, lasting as independent from 283-133 B.C., was originally founded as the fortified treasury of Lysimachus, successor to Alexander in Thrace. This fort and the treasure therein amounting to 9000 talents, was in the charge of a eunuch steward named Philetairos who justified the trust reposed in him in so far as the management of this treasure was concerned. During the quarrels of the Diadochoi or Successors to Alexander, presumably at the strategic moment, he transferred his allegiance from Lysimachus to Seleucus, doubtless on condition he be guaranteed his continued position as Master of the Treasury.

Despite the murder of Seleucus by Ptolemy Keraunus, the wily Philetairos clung to the fortunes of the Seleucids, probably understanding in their particular case, the political purposes of the International Money Power of Babylonia and Alexandria in these respects, and ingratiated himself with Antiochus, son of Seleucus, by buying the body of Seleucus from Ptolemy for return to Antiochus,⁽⁵⁾ thus, through it all maintaining his position at Pergamum...

Philetairos proceeded to use the treasure to which he had so masterfully established almost total right, with a skill which could only suggest training in the money shops of Babylonia, or Alexandria, or as close advisor, one so trained.

 

The conception of the 9000 talents of treasure in itself being the sole maintaining force behind the extended power of Pergamum, would be quaint to say the least; as quaint indeed as the story of the 6000 talents of silver held in reserve in the Acropolis at Athens as the sole finances with which the Peloponnesian war was fought; or in a later day of the gold supposedly existing in the vaults of the Bank of England or its predecessor, and its parent bank, the Bank of Amsterdam (the vaults of the latter on inspection by Napoleon ⁽⁶⁾ after occupation of Holland, proving absolutely bare!).

 

9000 talents drawn on for military and civilian expenditures, extensive bribes, etc., would not go very far.

Returning again to Professor Andreades, in his Finances De Guerre d'alexandre le grand,⁽⁷⁾ the annual expenditures of Alexander during the earlier years of his campaigning were 5000-7000 talents, which would, in the first year or two, certainly until the battle of Issus (Oct. 333 B.C.), have been in hard cash for the most part, to use the terminology of today's banker; that is, coined money or silver bullion, or the gold bullion of which the mines at Phillipi had made steady yield. In the later years of campaigning, Andreades estimated the annual expenditures of Alexander at 15,000 talents...

 

If the money for this expenditure derived from coined precious metal plunder, it would go even less far, for in newly occupied territories, the exploitation of the miseries of the people usual to these circumstances would exist, and there would be a collapse of "Credit" or abstract money, until reorganization set in. there would be total disturbance of the revenues deriving from taxes. silver, particularly, would either move eastward against luxury trading, which seems to continue as much as ever in such times, or would disappear into hoards.

During the first Millennium B.C., the ratio of silver to gold never went below 10:1, being usually 13:1 in Europe and the so-called Middle East.

 

In farther Bactria, India and China, it was rarely more than 6:1 and in some parts as low as 1:1.⁽⁸⁾ Therefore, once precious metal coinage was spent, particularly silver coinage, and passed into the hands of merchants, contractors, etc., finally returning to the bankers or money changers, with that field for assured profit by settlement of oriental trade balances with coined silver or silver bullion such as clearly existed, as according to Gresham's law,⁽⁹⁾ its local circulating volume might be assumed to decrease rapidly, and without a doubt did so decrease.

It might safely be said that the money power which enabled Pergamum to secure controlling interest over the cities of Pitane and Cyzicus,⁽¹⁰⁾ was not drawn from what might be left of that store of 9000 talents (the loan in the case of Pitane, probably a very minor transaction, was sufficient to substantially ease the burden of a debt of 380 talents)... It would have been part of a credit inflation which would have used the 9000 talents, or the legend in respect thereto, as its base, and more than likely those interests holding the debt of the city of Pitane were themselves indebted by another ledger entry transaction to Pergamum.

 

Thus that "Credit Money" transaction whereby Pitane was loaned money would be no more than an entry in the books of Pergamum as a credit to Pitane, automatically being thence debited and transferred to the credit column of the holder of the loan as previously existing against Pitane, and thus returning him to solvency.

In other words, Pergamum, at cost of pen, ink, vellum,⁽¹¹⁾ and slave scribe or perhaps (and more likely) cost of clay tablet and stylus book entry, was now in a position to dictate the political affairs of Pitane. Perhaps the agent for the Babylonian bankers or their Alexandrian counterparts, as the previous holder of the Pitane loan may have been, consequently recovered his liquid position so far as Pergamum was concerned, and was now able to look around again for more profitable investments.

The extent of the semi-military operations of the Attalid Money Power of Pergamum was shown above all by their purchase of the island of Aegina for thirty talents.⁽¹²⁾ This island they most likely set up as a centre for entre-pôt trade and a financial outpost, i.e., "Branch Bank": which had to be in opposition to the decaying Athenian money power which at that time did not have the silver resources of its earlier days on which to base its money power, and the legend of its great wealth.

The Laurion mines were petering out, and those markets in South Russia,⁽¹³⁾ Thrace, etc., formerly supplied by Athenian manufactured products, were fast failing at the time of Pergamum and the Attalids; having set up their own local manufacturies.

 

Athens, no longer centre of an Empire, neither military, or financial power, with fewer markets ready to settle debit trade balances with those slaves so much required for silver mining, as had been South Russia, was likely just a pleasant place to live in; the storms brewed by settlement of International Money Power as in days gone by, passed over.

As Pergamum marks the beginning of that period when Delos and Rhodes were leading money and slave markets of the world, it would seem that some kind of agreement must have existed between those who controlled trade and finance at all these points.

 

Considering the essential secrecy that necessarily attends the corrupt operations of so-called bankers, it may be quite reasonable to suppose, that in Pergamum itself, in Aegina, Delos, Rhodes and for that matter, a dozen other trade centers, there was a class of persons who very well understood each other's interests, who very likely were related by racial and religious custom, and whose supra-nationalism transcended all city boundaries and borders of states.

Money was their trade, and they married only amongst their own group as the best protection towards maintaining inviolable the secret of that financial hegemony they had established internationally, and which in a way had put them above kingship; no doubt in the fevered imagination of some of them, one with the gods.

 

Through the illusion of the establishment of silver as the standard of value internationally or nationally, and whose supply they totally controlled, it is true, they actually did wield that power which formerly had been the sole prerogative of the gods in the cities of ancient Sumeria, through their sons upon earth, the Priest-Kings; even if only as the venal and self-interested men that they were.

The activities of this group towards the instigation of wars, and disturbances never ceased. Out of the needs of peoples in despair came their advantage and strengthened control; and because they controlled the fiscal affairs of the temples, whose very existence became completely intertwined with their activities,⁽¹⁴⁾ it may safely be said that they controlled the oracular pronouncements which so often could decide yea or nay to war...

 

Out of rumor generally they guided the moods of the peoples... Such wars were necessary, as much as today, towards the maintenance of their great arms industry and their continued control through the sale of the best and newest of weapons to that new "conqueror" who promised most of all to serve their purposes in the renewal of their stocks of treasure, so necessary to maintain "confidence", and their stocks of mine slaves. war also revived that feverish and competitive demand for that treasure; and in the hurly-burly it created, merchants gladly accepted as money anything offered from seemingly reputable sources including that abstract money denoted by ledger credit page entry; the loan of which but cost the lender the entry by slave scribe on the clay tablet, though immense real wealth might be offered as "collateral" as against failure to repay such alleged loan by the date stipulated.

The far-flung activities of Apollonius, economic manager to Ptolemy Philadelphus, as recorded by Professor Rostovtsev,⁽¹⁵⁾ give but a glimpse of this interlocking control by an Aramaic speaking middle class, within which the Hebrew may also have been an interwoven thread... Perhaps the weft, although not the weft and the warp...

For indeed there is no evidence that he was all, and that such magnates that controlled the economy of the ancient world were many of them Jews. Nevertheless the claim by the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia ⁽¹⁶⁾ that the Hebrews, as a people who absorbed foreign cultures, yet rigidly maintain their national identity caused them to be most appreciated by the brilliant and ambitious Alexander, should not be lightly dismissed.

 

Alexander was trainee of Aristotle, who, as husband of the niece of Hermias, Banker-Tyrant of Assos and Atameus, certainly should have come to learn something of the true meaning of Money Power. Alexander therefore, presumably had substantial understanding of the meaning of money relative to Kingship...

The Hebrew, as equally skilled in money and trade as the Aramean and equally fluent in Aramaic, since he was established in most of the important cities of the ancient world, from the Pillars of Hercules to India in which Aramaic, certainly existed as lingua franca, at least in those cities between India and the Levant, could very well have been a major part of that vehicle constructed by Alexander to spread his dream of Pan-Hellenism.

 

His special concessions to Jaddua, High Priest in Jerusalem in 333 B.C. in respect to those Jews of both Judea and Babylon, and also in respect to the foundation of Alexandria,⁽¹⁷⁾ certainly suggest deference to a power far beyond that power visibly represented by that relatively small group of people who dwelt at Jerusalem and on the highlands by which it was surrounded...

 

According to the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia: during the siege of Tyre by Alexander, Jaddua, High Priest of Jerusalem, not wishing to offend Persia and Darius, had refused Alexander the troops and provisions he sought ⁽¹⁸⁾... After the fall of Tyre, Alexander advanced on Jerusalem, ancient ally of Tyre as the assistance of Hiram, King of Tyre towards the building of the Temple of Solomon will call to mind;⁽¹⁹⁾ undoubtedly with the intention of reducing that city should no satisfactory settlement be reached.

As Alexander neared the Temple, so the story goes, the High Priest clothed in full vestments of gold and purple, and the Priests in their sacerdotal robes, and a great multitude dressed in white, went out to meet him, the decision having no doubt been arrived at that discretion was the better part of valor. Alexander, seeing the High Priest and his mitre on which was written the Name of God, reverenced the Name and saluted the High Priest. He said he had seen a figure such as the High Priest in a dream, who had told him he would give him Lordship over the Persian Hosts.

Then Alexander entered the city, and, as was his usual custom with submissive cities, he sacrificed to their God...

The fact that he gave the Jews of Palestine such special concessions as a years remission of taxes which was also extended to the Jews of Babylonia, and specially invited any Jew to settle in his city of Alexandria, would suggest that the visible help refused him by Jaddua had been more than made up for by assistance of a less visible nature such as, it might reasonably be expected, had helped to secure the fall of Babylon, to Cyrus, ancestor of Darius, and founder of the Achaemenid Dynasty of Persia ⁽²⁰⁾...

 

The stress on the Aramaic speaking middle class of all those "Empires" from the Assyrian, until the successors to Alexander, and perhaps beyond, is more than justified in view of the results of the studies of various scholars.

 

If Aramaic was the language of officialdom under the achaemenid rulers of the Persian empire, and remained so under Alexander and the successors, it may reasonably be supposed that the official and merchant classes that used Aramaic as their everyday language, had gone far beyond the borders of the Persian empire, both to the east and to the west. as has been previously pointed out, with that Aramaic interstratum moved also to the east and west, the agents of that money power centered in Mesopotamia, heir to the secrets, not only of the Sumerian priesthood, but of the priesthood of much more ancient times, selling as they went along the idea of the use of precious metal money.

No sooner had short sighted rulers instituted the use of precious metal money, than the agents of such money power, to whom by now the ruler was beholden for supplies of bullion, were setting up "modern" banking houses. in short order the various practices of dubious legality that are the foundations of such money power would be instituted.

 

Firstly that of the creation, relatively without limit, of abstract units of exchange as through the institution of ledger credit page entry money, under whatever cover to create legality, and which the banker claimed was backed by his "Credit"! - (As if he could have more "Credit" than any sovereign people and their ruler!) - and which was usually backed in final analysis by little or nothing other than the sanction of a foolish prince.

 

Secondly, from the point of view of maintenance of "confidence" so far as lesser trade was concerned, was the issue of intrinsically valueless facsimiles of existing precious metal coinage, for every one of which a customer who accepted them in the exchanges, thought that there was a precious metal original lodged in the local temple or acropolis.

To our Lord Jesus Christ, Aramaic was the everyday language that would have enabled him to travel, and converse freely with scholar, poet, priest, and merchant, certainly as far East as Peshawar. Aramaic is used in the Syrian Christian Church, in the Jewish liturgy, and still lives in the villages of the Anti-Lebanon, in South East Anatolia, and on the Eastern shores of Lake Urmia in Armenia.⁽²¹⁾

Thus the opinion of Emil G.H. Kraeling ⁽²²⁾ that the Aramean was the vehicle by which the so called eternal values of Hellas and Israel were communicated throughout the Orient, in a way concurs with the Opinion of the Jewish Encyclopedia referred to above.⁽²³⁾

 

That those values denoted by Hellas withered and almost disappeared, while those as denoted by Israel through Christianity, flourished until relatively recently, is merely further proof that money power must destroy the body on which it feeds, and is nourished, and the body it fed on at the time herein recorded, that is, immediately after Alexander, was Hellas, and indeed, Israel itself.

 

It cannot flourish alongside blind belief and simple faith which instinctively tear off its impudent claims as they gnaw their way into the very heart of the Tree of Life.

Nevertheless, out of Babylonian money power itself, oblivious it seems to its own real self interest, carrying Christianity as far as those limits unto which its total hegemony prevailed, Christianity itself rose as an island of love and goodness in an ocean of hatred, confusion, greed, and depravity that had come to exist as the ultimate result of at least three thousand years of the depredations of such private money creative power...

 

With one convulsive shrug it threw off the snake like coils, reestablishing thereafter the natural order of life, of god, priest-king and priesthood and the people, all living as was ordained, with faith, piety, and sure belief...

 

Thereafter, for a thousand years, International Money Power can only be faintly discerned, as a smoldering ember; a fire not entirely extinguished; evidence thereof being an occasional wisp of smoke as it waited for a day when a certain evil wind might blow, and flames come forth again to deal man total woe...



References

1. P.N. Ure, M.A.: The Origins of Tyranny, P. 280; New York; 1922.

2. Walter Leaf: The Journal of Hellenic Studies. P. 167.

3. The Origins of Tyranny, P. 281. In his footnote Dr. Ure remarks that Leaf might have gone on to quote the case of Timaeus the Cyzicene, who, like Euaion, and perhaps Hermias, had been a pupil of Plato:

"Timaeus the Cyzicene having granted bonuses of money and corn to the citizens and having on that account won credit among the Cyzicenes as being a worthy man, after a short while made an attempt on the city by means of Aridias."

Athens XI. 509a. footnote P. 281. Origins of Tyranny.

4. "if the praetor gave the money as it is set down, he drew it from the qoaestor, the quaestor from the public bank, the public bank derived it either from revenue or tribute".... Which does not suggest that the great Cicero also had too much of an understanding of money: this was said over 2000 years ago. Orationes. Cicero. Book XIX, Pro Flaccus, P. 445. Vol. II, C.D. Yonge, B.A., Bell, London, 1883.

5. P.N. Ure, M.A.: The Origins of Tyranny, P. 285.

6. A. Andreades: A History of the Bank of England, P. 80; London; 1966.

7. A. Andreades: Annales D'histoire economique et sociale, P. 330; Paris; 1929.

8. A. del Mar: A History of Monetary Systems, P. 505: Ratios.

9. A. Del Mar: A History of Monetary Systems. P. 355; New York; 1969. In the Maxims of Theognis (line 21) is stated: "nor will anyone take in exchange worse when better is to be had."

10. P.N. Ure, M.A.: The Origins of Tyranny, P. 285; New York; 1922.

11. A. del Mar: A History of the Precious Metals, P. 105; New York; 1966.

12. P.N. Ure, M.A.: The Origins of Tyranny, P. 285.

13. Mikhail I. Rostovtsev: A Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World, Page 108; Oxford; 1941.

14. Oskar Seffert: A Dictionary of Classical Antiquities, P. 91; (Trans. a Nettleship, M.A., New York; 1904.)

15. Mikhail I. Rostovtaev: A Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World, P. 227, Vol.I.

16. Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, P. 172, Vol. I.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. Chronicles, Book II. Chapter 2.

20. On this matter The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia reads:

"the objection that Alexander could have no interest in the jews is answered by his own life and subsequent actions. an astute statesman of penetrating vision, Alexander was quick to grasp the indispensable value of the jews in the cultural, political and intellectual sphere of his world empire. Alexander's aim was the synthesis of Occidental and Oriental cultures into the mould of Hellenism; undoubtedly he appreciated the capacity of the Jews to absorb foreign culture, while rigidly maintaining their national identity thus making them an ideal vehicle for his civilizing enterprise.

 

As Jews were already an International commercial power, numbers of them being found in most countries of Alexander's domain, he granted them many political privileges when he founded Alexandria, and even gave them a portion of Samaria with exemption from taxes in order to gain their support. it is even possible that Alexander had first heard of the jews from his teacher, Aristotle who, according to the report of Josephus, had met a jew who was a veritable philosopher and a "Greek"not only in language but in soul."

Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, P. 172. Vol. I.

21. Peter Bamm: Alexander the Great; Power as Destiny. P. 72. London; 1968.

22. Emil G.H Kraeling: Aram and Israel, P. 1.

23. Present work, P. 148.

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VOICES FROM THE DUST

Before ever the lust seized the Greeks for the precious metal pieces on which were recorded their laws in respect to the unit of exchange; that is, before Greece became completely thrall to the international bullion and slave interests, money had existed among them in various forms for a long time previously.⁽¹⁾

 

Little knowledge remains of such systems of exchange as existed prior to the assumption of international bullion and slave interests of total hegemony over a great deal of Greece, but exist such systems did, and the significance of its monetary units issued against state expenses, and as opposed to issue by private persons as against collateral security, was understood, as the evidence of the Sparta of Lycurgus indicates...

On this subject Babelon, French Numismatist of the 19th Century says:

...“ Having established the existence of these salmons or spits of iron that were the circulating money of the Peloponnese, it will be easy for us to define clearly the part played by this prince (Pheidon). He was not inventor of money, but the same as Servius Tullius, a reformer. He introduced into the Peloponnese a definite system of weights and measures, instead of the numerous systems that had thrown confusion and disorder into commercial relations; he adapted the weight of the new money to the new system of weights, and he officially abolished the old and cumbersome iron money, of which he consecrated several samples in the Temple at Argos...” ⁽²⁾

Numismatists airily dismiss the suggestions of the symbols of money as being indicated in ancient times on leather, wood, or baked clay, which are found in both Cedrenus, Suidas, and Seneca,⁽³⁾ but study of so-called primitive currencies of today, such as the shell moneys of Oceania, leave little doubt that our forefathers, fully understanding of the true philosophy of money, may very well have used such intrinsically valueless materials to record the values of their tangible money, prior to the commencement of precious metal coinage; in the same way as the Melanesians and Micronesians have used shells for such purpose, from time immemorial.⁽⁴⁾

There can be no doubt that those social organizations such as existed prior to the establishment of precious metals as a standard by which values were assessed, were often, in the case of the Northern Mediterranean and Anatolia, erected on a structure, of which integral part was system of exchange constructed according to the teachings of such philosophy.

However, that the numismatists dismiss the significance of such money and question it as having ever existed, is not surprising considering that they merely record the money towards the creation of which the controllers of bullion supplied the material; thus in a way controlling its issue and such order of society as it gave rise to, and therefore the numismatists themselves...

 

Consequently the dismissal by the numismatists of other materials for money and its symbols, not internationally desirable or controllable by their masters might be expected.

According to Professor Fritz Heichelheim in his Ancient Economic History, Suidas ascribes the monetary use of leather and “ostrakina” (pieces of shell and pottery) to the Romans previous to Numa Pompilius. shells appear on the coins of Magna Graecia, especially those of Tarentum, which may be an indication that shell money was known in the Italy ⁽⁵⁾ of historical memory, at that time...

 

Oyster shells discovered by Heinrich Schlieman in the Royal graves at Mycenae together with obsidian weapons, indicate that in an age when obsidian weapons were still in use, also remained respect for certain shells that in former times had been evincement of stored wealth ⁽⁶⁾... But equally as any other, such a currency only had value insomuch as it carried with it the will of the ruler.

In the Hittite language there are many words almost identical to their counterpart in Latin:⁽⁷⁾

Hittite for knee.... Genu Latin.... Genu
.... Quis.... Quis
.... Kuit.... Quid

Troy fell to the Greeks under Agamemnon in 1250 B.C. according to the modern dating and the opinion of Herodotus. That Troy was the outpost of the Hittite empire that controlled the Dardanelles, and that the rulers of Troy spoke a Hittite language, is reasonable supposition.⁽⁸⁾

 

The destruction of Bog-Haz Koi, the Hittite capital is now accepted as being 1225 B.C. This event, which could only have taken place as the result of investment by experienced, disciplined, and well organized forces, with an excellent engineering corps, considering that so many well walled cities had fallen before them, brought the Hittite world to fragmentation.⁽⁹⁾

Therefore during the years from the time of the crossing of the Dardanelles and the sack of Troy, to the time of the total collapse that must have followed the destruction of Bog-Haz Koi, refugees would have sought freedom by sailing westward, which direction it seems was the only way to go.

 

To the North and North-West were the “Peoples of the Sea”, to the south-east was Assyria, obviously ally of the same “Peoples of the Sea”, and to the south, Ugarit and Alalakh were empty ruins, and the coast to the Sinai border occupied by the enemies of the Hittites.

Therefore it seems reasonable that the legend of the settlement of Aeneas, refugee from Troy in the territory of Latinus as recorded by Livy ⁽¹⁰⁾ the same as most legends, had a basis of fact. This is further shown by the close resemblance between the Hittite, Trojan, Latin languages as pointed out above. According to Dawson ⁽¹¹⁾ the production of leather in the Hittite world was a state monopoly.

 

Such monopoly of leather production would suggest the possibility, if not the likelihood of leather as the material on which the symbols of their money were recorded...

For any state to be as strong as indeed was the Hittite state for a relatively long period of time, and, moreover, stable, it had to control, not merely the issue of the unit of exchange, but also the material of which its visible symbols were made; which, of course had to be total monopoly. The fact that the Hittite state appears to have been one constructed to the same order as those early Mesopotamian cities, that is, of God, Priest-King and priesthood and the devoted living in natural order, makes this deduction the more likely.

The similarity of language, together with the legend relative to Troy would certainly suggest the forefathers of the patricians of Rome derived from Northern Anatolia, and therefore from within the Hittite (or Bog-Haz Koi) sphere of influence. If so, would it not be natural for them to reinstitute the same monetary system amongst themselves as they had known in their homelands?

The numismatists and historians date the Aes Grave, considered by them to be the first true metallic currency of Rome, from 338 B.C.⁽¹²⁾ accepting the opinion of Professor Haeberlin ⁽¹³⁾... What then did Rome use for money prior to that date considering the relatively exact property valuations and taxes of Servius? That they used rough lumps of copper (Aes Rude) as everyday money, cannot be accepted.

 

There is no vestige of a doubt that a refined system existed by no means unrelated to the exchange systems definitely known to have existed in Greece, and in which a form of “Credit”, too often a privately created abstract money, was made use of. This system may have been no more related to silver bullion, than it may have been to any other commodity, and international silver bullion interests would exercise no definite control therein.

There would be no reason whatsoever to discredit Suidas’ remarks in respect to leather and clay money previous to Numa Pompilius. The clay “scarabs” still being unearthed in Etruria may very well represent evidence of the clay units. Leather money of course would long since have perished. nor is there reason to think that the fiduciary money of clay undoubtedly issued by the bankers of Athens in the 5th century b.c.,⁽¹⁴⁾ was in anyway a new idea.

 

As throughout the Near East clay was the principal medium for the keeping of records, the use of clay money follows naturally, and might well be expected in Etruria or wherever the agents of the Babylonian or Greek bankers traded; the clay coin itself also being record; a tangible evincement of the creation of a unit of exchange, or divisible or multiple thereof.

According to Livy, relative to the financing of the cavalry of Rome of the Kings:... “each century had a grant from the treasury of 10.000 aeses for the purchase of horses, with a further grant levied on rich widows of 2000 a year for their feeding and maintenance.” ⁽¹⁵⁾

If then there was neither minted silver or copper at the time of Servius, are we to understand that the rich widows came to the treasury with bags of pieces of rough copper? ⁽¹⁶⁾

Where taxes withdraw units of exchange from circulation, there must be a force which injects such units of exchange into the circulation. What therefore was the source of such units of exchange or moneys as were injected into the circulation in order that the people of Rome of the kings might estimate their worth with some exactitude and according to a certain standard...? Clearly there is no reason to doubt this record of Livy...

In the Panadects of Justinian, Tenth Book, occurs this remarkable passage from Julius Paulus, jurisconsul of the third century of our era:

“ The origin of buying and selling began with exchange. Anciently money was unknown and there existed no terms by which merchandise could be precisely valued but everyone according to the times and circumstances, exchanged things useless to him against things which were useful; for it commonly happens that one is in need of what another has in excess.

 

But as it seldom coincided in time that what one possessed, the other one wanted, or conversely, a device was chosen whose legal and permanent value remedied by its homogeneity the difficulties of barter. This device being officially promulgated, circulated, and maintained its purchasing power, not so much from its substance as from its quantity. Since that time only one consideration in an exchange was called merchandise, the other was called price.”

Whether those devices such as governed the exchanges of early Rome and Etruria were clay or leather or wood does not really matter. As such they were true money being intrinsically valueless, and only of value because of that law which ordered their acceptance in the exchanges and that they be of value as according to their scarcity or otherwise relative to the goods and services for sale...

 

What would above all matter would be the ease with which they could be counterfeited, no doubt the source of their ultimate failure, and whether they were loaned into circulation by private persons against so-called collateral, or paid into circulation as against government expenses, as were the Aes Grave at a later date.

This fragment from Paulus repeating the words of a commonwealth scholar of whose work even then little remained, did no more than express the opinions of all the philosophers-scholars of antiquity, at least, those of whom record exists. Almost all of them wrote of numerical or fiduciary systems of money as being the only natural systems. None of them, however entered into discussion as to whether issuance should be as against state indebtedness.

 

It was so obviously a necessity for good order and well-being in life, that such discussion never seems to have occurred to them.

 

The success of private monetary emission in this day and its boldness now that its former criminal activities are recognized and accepted as inevitable, such men could not even imagine, not even Aristotle, who it is certain by reason of his family connections, must have known something of the undercurrents of the financial world as it existed at that time.

Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Zeno, all seemed to have been clear on the subject, and all lived at a time when fiduciary systems were still in existence, both in the Greek states although there is little record, and elsewhere.⁽¹⁷⁾

 

Plato was most clear on the subject and no doubt had studied the numerical system that had obtained at Sparta not long before when he was a young man. Living between 429 B.C. and 347 B.C., he must have been at Athens during the Peloponnesian War when such system certainly must still have existed in Sparta, or have been a recent memory; even if, as seems most likely, as a result of the war, it had been replaced by the Athenian system of private money issue based on the fiction of precious metals or valuables in reserve.

 

As Aeschines, also pupil of Plato was conversant with that fiduciary system of Carthage,⁽¹⁸⁾ it is more than likely that Plato was so instructed. As no coinage in precious metal was struck at Carthage itself until 340 B.C.,⁽¹⁹⁾ it may reasonably be supposed that at the time of writing The Laws, either 348 B.C. or 349 B.C., there would have been Carthaginian agents at Athens, well able to explain their monetary system to enquirers.

 

On the subject Plato wrote:

“Further the Law (of the ideal Republic) enjoins that no private individual shall possess or hoard gold and silver bullion, but have money only for domestic use, such as is necessary for dealing with artisans and servants, sojourners and slaves. Wherefore our citizens should have a money current amongst themselves but not acceptable to the rest of mankind. For foreign expeditions, journeys, embassies, the expense of heralds (abroad) and such matters, the government must also possess a fund of coins in other states.

 

When an individual needs to go abroad, let him obtain the consent of the Archon and go; but on his return if he has any such money remaining let him deposit it in the treasury and receive an equivalent sum in local money. If he is discovered to have concealed it, let it be confiscated, and let him who knows and does not inform, be subject to anathema and dishonor equally with him who brought the money, and also to a fine not less in amount than that of the universal money which had been brought back.” ⁽²⁰⁾

Gathering together further fragments of evidence we see that Aristotle less than 400 years after Pheidon of Argos, made comment:

“Nomisma (Money) by itself is a mere device which has value only by law (Nomos) and not by nature; so that a change of convention between those who use it, is sufficient to deprive it of value and its power to satisfy our wants.” ⁽²¹⁾

In The Ethics, Aristotle states further:

“By virtue of voluntary convention, Nomisma has become the media of exchange. We call it Nomisma because its efficacy is due, not to nature but to Nomos (Law) and because it is always in our power to control it.” ⁽²²⁾

Thus despite at least four hundred years of control of trade by the masters of precious metal bullion, the scholars still clearly understood the actuality of money and that it was an evincement of the law.

 

They still understood it was but so many numbers injected into a circulation amongst the people relating value to value, and not in any way influenced by the material on which these numbers as laws were recorded. The scholars must, however, have been aware that in the case of these laws being recorded on precious metal, if the convention in respect to the value of the unit of exchange was changed, so far as financial houses with facilities for smelting and export of bullion were concerned, there was no loss.

 

If the change in convention was disadvantageous to such holder of precious metal coin, such coin could be reduced to bullion and quietly exported to that country offering the most advantage to holders of such bullion...

To say that money as such began with the striking of precious metal coinage is therefore incorrect. The statement that an international control over money came about as a result of a certain group of private persons, members of which were located in all major states of the world, creating a monopoly of those precious metals of which its symbols were coming to be made, or, better put, on which they were imprinted, would be more to the point.

The evidence that the earliest coinages in Greece had essentially a local circulation in no way alters the picture previously outlined of silver money as being part of an international conspiracy.

 

All Greek states apart from Athens and Samos, Siphnos and Corcyra, and possibly one or two others, had to obtain silver bullion for their coinage from abroad, which necessarily obliged them to deal with those traders who specialized in dealing in bullion.

 

Such trade in bullion had to be in the hands of a small and highly secretive group, as much on account of the sources of supply being relatively few and scattered as it were out to the ends of the earth, as on account of the fact that it would be only such a group that could also control those supplies of slave labor and their purchase from triumphant peoples whose warlike activities, as likely as not, they had instigated themselves; slave labor so necessary to the success of their mining operations.

For example, the fact that the Carthaginian mines of Spain show no signs of even the use of the ordinary propping and shoring associated with mining,⁽²³⁾ cannot but indicate that the miners were most likely captives of war from distant parts, purchased for a song from a victorious general, and driven under threat of the lash.

At that period it would appear, such labor was so plentiful that the cost of purchase of new slaves, would have been less than the cost of ordinary safety precautions. The silver mines of Spain as worked by the Romans, show interestingly enough an entirely different story.⁽²⁴⁾

 

All safety methods, including the use of concrete, were used; which also agrees with the fact that Rome, even when silver money was in use, particularly in foreign trade, so far as internal exchanges were concerned, had a relatively ample supply of money for the details of day to day organization in the overvalued bronze fiduciaries, the most grandiose aes and its parts or multiples.⁽²⁵⁾

History has proven over and over again that a precious metal coinage will move one way or another to where it might realize the most profit either as coin or bullion.

 

The so-called law of the economists known as Gresham’s law states just that:

“Bad money drives out the good...” which means that the silver in circulating would be replaced by that less intrinsically valuable money, if such also circulated, and which the economists described as “the bad,” (the question of course being bad for whom?); such silver being hoarded and exported to whatever market offered the best price or advantage.

Cases of wider application of this so-called law are without number, and as much as of application to a lesser degree.

 

A few outstanding ones are:

1. The disappearance of silver from Athens and its replacement by baked clay facsimiles during the 5th Century B.C. and by yellowish copper (or orichalcum) at the end of the same century.
    

2. The drain of silver from Rome during the late commonwealth and the early Empire, particularly to the Orient,⁽²⁶⁾ where the ratio varied around 6:1 to gold as compared to that established by Caesar of 12:1, and its replacement by bronze or orichalcum fiduciaries.
    

3. The drain of English silver coinage to India after the act of 1666.⁽²⁷⁾ Such silver being replaced by the “Bad” money of the goldsmith’s receipts and the Bank of England notes and ledger credit page entries.
    

4. The disappearance of the silver rubles in Russia ⁽²⁸⁾ during the 18th Century almost as soon as they left the mint, their place being taken by the “Bad” money of the copper rubles, and, later, after Catherine, by the “Bad” money of the paper rubles (assignats).
    

5. The almost complete disappearance from the circulation between the years 1967-1973 of silver coins of our own country of Canada: such silver being replaced by coins fabricated from base metal alloys, relative to the silver coins, without intrinsic value.

Returning to Ancient Greece, Professor Heichelheim states:

“Such hoards as found previous to 560 B.C. are found in the areas in which they were minted and never in other countries...” ⁽²⁹⁾

Which fact indicates that prior to 560 B.C. it is probable that laws governing the export of coin were strictly enforced in Greece. Any silver that left a state would do so covertly as bullion.

 

The following Athenian Edict is evidence that such laws existed:

“Let no Athenian or sojourner lend money to be exported unless (to pay) for corn or some such commodity allowed by Law.” ⁽³⁰⁾

By the time of Plato, something less than two hundred years later the real weaknesses of precious metal systems of coinage were beginning to show, hence the increasing discussion of the matter of money in the schools of philosophy, although such discussion does not seem to have given rise to any vigorous action by the Grecian States.

 

The establishment of the Aes Grave system at Rome may have been a direct result of such discussion, and the establishment of this numerical coinage of bronze certainly bears close resemblance to that internal coinage as recommended by Plato for the ideal Republic.⁽³¹⁾ By the date generally accepted as the commencement of the Aes Grave system, that is 338 B.C., Roman scholars would have been fully aware of the teachings of Plato.

 

This city state, already stirred by consciousness of its world destiny, would have neglected no instrument towards the maintenance of morale and strength in the structure of its internal life... Such an instrument was the Aes Grave system in which the national money was paid into circulation by the state, and only of value insomuch as the symbols on which its numbers were recorded, were scarce or otherwise.

The weaknesses inherent in precious metal coinage systems as becoming apparent in the time of Plato were as follows:

1. The coins wore out or were hoarded out of circulation.

2. Hard rock mining was never profitable without slave labor so far as the Master Miner was concerned.⁽³²⁾

3. The mine slaves died and sometimes, there being no wars, they could not be replaced so easily.

4. The mines themselves became exhausted.

5. In a time of national calamity, when coinage was most of all needed, it disappeared into hoards, largely held by foreigners, members of that secret class of persons to whom wars were but opportunity to drive harder bargains yet again, with mankind and his states and peoples.

6. Even in time of peace, captains and merchants, if permitted, were ever seeking a cargo for their return trip. If such cargo was not available, they would take away their balances in precious metals or slaves.

A country such as Greece, by no means rich agriculturally as was the Egyptian Delta, yet having a relatively large population to feed, in its declining days would usually have an unfavorable balance of trade; which further, despite laws to the contrary, drained away its precious metal coinage or bullion. At the time of Plato, this condition must have been really showing and its significance.

The Laureion mines were petering out despite the agitation by Xenophon for the Government of Athens to purchase ten thousand slaves to lease to mine owners,⁽³³⁾ (presumably to be obtained from his financial sponsors), and where in days gone by there had been considerable silver circulating at Athens particularly, now it had become scarce and there was an insufficiency.

The numerous clay facsimiles of Eastern Mediterranean coinages, still being found at Athens,⁽³⁴⁾ show that the foreign bankers, in accordance with Gresham’s so-called law, were quietly filling the void now appearing with issues of a fiduciary character such as our paper money, exemplified in their case by the baked clay facsimiles mentioned by lenormant which the bankers clearly were injecting into circulation to their own private account, and, of course, that of their most useful Greek agents.

 

This would be effected by pointing out to a customer to whom the banker was prepared to make a loan, how much safer the actual silver would be if left with the banker’s reserve in the Acropolis where it would be guarded by the gods themselves, and how these clay facsimiles which all the customers were accepting, could always be redeemed in silver if really necessary (!).⁽³⁵⁾

Seltsman in Greek Coins ⁽³⁶⁾ says that about this period, following the complete collapse of the Athenian Empire, Athens resumed its previous financial activities through the growth of powerful “Banks”, such as that of passion which operated in all major Greek cities, providing a money market for all of the Greek world.

 

However, Seltsman makes no mention of abstract expansions of the monetary unit, nor of the clay facsimiles which were the tangible evincement of such expansion, and whose power to inspire confidence was the main source of that renewed financial activity, and whose existence and purpose was defined by François Ienormant, even if somewhat diffidently... (p. 27, present work.)

What Seltsman really points out to us in stressing that Athens resumed its previous financial activities with powerful banks such as that of Passion operating in all major Greek cities, is the correctness of our previous conjecture that the real underlying purposes of the “Great” Peloponnesian war was to establish private common money market across the Greek world totally controlled by the trapezitae or bankers in modern terminology.

 

Banks, too, could not thrive and realize full potential except that government was become their instrument, and that Government, the creator of the laws of the land, was in their debt, as according to these same laws of the land, as much as private citizens.

 

The foundation of this god-power, to which, as a result of the utter exhaustion of Athens and Sparta, and the death of their noblest, there were none to offer resistance, was government borrowing of the banker’s fictitious “Credit” money; and although there may be little evidence of such in Athens at that time, it is clear that this situation had been brought about.

 

The frantic efforts of the Athenian government after the war to devise methods to stimulate increase of government spending, such as the donatives and the theorica, while at the same time devising methods to withdraw money from the public circulation, such as by sales tax,⁽³⁷⁾ reveal that Athenian Government was now more firmly than ever in the hands of International Money Power, if Sparta was but now re-arrived there after absence of three hundred years or so.⁽³⁸⁾

Both Athens and Sparta were in no better a position than they were before the war. Neither one had won and neither one had lost. Both lay exhausted, and over their prostrate bodies the servants of this same sardonic Money Power drew the chains of their slavery.

Although Seltsman says the source of the renewal of the prosperity of Athens was the new markets in Cyrene, Chalcidice, and South Russia, Rostovtsev points out that the South Russian market, the most important of all, was closing due to local manufactures, and in the fourth century, Attic and Ionian imports disappear entirely in South Russia,⁽³⁹⁾ where, in the sixth and fifth centuries they had been extensive.⁽⁴⁰⁾

 

According to Rostovtsev, at Athens during the fourth century B.C., both population and unemployment increased, prices rose, and there was so-called “class struggle” and discontent.⁽⁴¹⁾

Increase in prices is usually indicative of increase of the number of monetary units in circulation, that is, of the money supply relative to goods and services for sale. Unemployment would not cancel out such increase in the money supply; for money had to be created for the Donatives and theorica which belong to this time. Herein is further proof of some artificial and invisible growth of the monetary unit.

 

So while the markets for Greek agricultural and industrial products had shrunk considerably, and were no more able to absorb the goods that were being offered to them by Greece,⁽⁴²⁾ money was still being created, in Athens particularly, and being put into circulation as against “Free Bread and Circuses”, such as indeed were the donatives and theorica; consequently causing inflation and the rise of prices of record. considering the findings of professor Rostovtsev as being more likely than those of Seltsman, it is clear that what Athens exported, and possible some other cities in Greece where such as passion had branches, was, after the “Great” Peloponnesian war, privately created capital.⁽⁴³⁾

 

Thus in what we know of as Antiquity, the full meaning of the unit of exchange as a purely abstract conception, regardless of what material it was recorded on for the purposes of day to day exchanges, was clearly understood; and without a doubt this knowledge was inheritance from ancient days, long before the advent of exchanges based on silver by weight.

Judging by Sparta, perhaps some of the Greek states mentioned by Boeckh,⁽⁴⁴⁾ and later by Rome itself, it seems that in ancient times there was some considerable understanding of the power inherent in precious metal money to destroy, by lending itself to manipulation, the status quo of any race or state.

 

The tremendous possibilities inherent in its use as the material on which the visible units of money were recorded towards the manipulation of prices and the consequent monopolization of wealth which always derived therefrom, through the process of loan against collateral security inflating the money supply, and giving rise to the seeming prosperity of great activity, followed by the “calling” of such loans, under one excuse or another, when the resultant prosperity was at its height, was well understood by the “Bankers”.

 

Also was known how to create periods of “lack of confidence”, during which prices fell to less than the previous cost of manufacture, and when consequently manufacturers became disheartened, and were glad to sell out to anyone to whom the banker directed them for whatever they could get. That is, if they were lucky.

 

If they were not quite so lucky, then their stock and factory would be seized as against the supposed debt, and sold at auction... no doubt such auctions were rigged in ancient times, just as much as they often are today.

Those states previously mentioned, understanding therefore the evils of private emission of precious metal money, and that precious metal money must always be private money emission, except the state owns the mines, and takes absolutely total precaution to prevent the export of its metal except by its own decision as against its own needs, clearly, when all other states and princes were succumbing to the world drive of the international bankers, rejected banking as such, and the bullion brokers its founders.

 

It was not until the 4th Century B.C. that they finally gave in, to what was undoubtedly an unremitting pressure, and this more likely as a result of the conquests of, firstly, the Achaemenid Princes of Persia, and secondly, the conquests of Alexander. After Alexander there do not seem many states left in which precious metal money did not constitute the circulating medium, and therefore could not be influenced by the activities of that secret and international group of people who made the so-called Gresham’s Law very much of a reality to the undoing of rulers and their peoples.

The sequence of “Boom” and “Bust” just as in today, can be traced as follows:

In the first place bankers and their agents no doubt worked together to cause this money, which it may safely be said, originally cost them no more than entry by slave scribe on the clay tablet, to be seemingly plentiful. As a result, business flourished, wages increased and prices rose. This rise in prices ultimately caused a situation in which foreign merchandise sold competitively on the home market. In consequence some home manufacturers, unable to compete, went into bankruptcy.

 

The panic thus created amongst manufacturers beholden to the banks, prepared them for the inevitability of the likelihood of demand by their bank for repayment of loans outstanding. By now the bankers were telling everyone that Times were bad.... “There was a freeze in Credit.” and “No Money about”. So when such loans were “Called”, the manufacturers dutifully hunted up all the silver they could find, and if they were able, paid off the banker. When this collapse of industry, and consequently prices, reached a certain point, it became no longer profitable for foreign merchandise to sell on their home market, creating the opportunity for resumption of their own industries.

 

The bankers, satisfied that the “Depression” had yielded sufficient rewards, and with a new crop of industrialists now directly under their thumbs, or in control of their trusted agents, industry would be resumed. loans again were forthcoming from the banker’s overflowing strong rooms, or simply the same place as that from which originated the previous loans, his ledger; being therein merely a creation of stylus and clay tablet.... thus were the foundations laid for a new steady rise in prices...

Herein, in this everlasting “Boom” and “Bust” of the so called “Empires” and “Civilizations” of the last few thousand years is the root cause of the desperate situation in which the indo-european peoples now find themselves, and, in which, seemingly having everything, in reality they have nothing except total exhaustion and the spectre of total anarchy and destruction looming ever more clearly before them, for they no longer have the will to be...

With planned miscegenation and what could very well prove to be planned race self-extermination through the promotion of the use of conception aborting “medicines”, and of abortion itself by “operation” involving the tearing of the living fetus from the womb, the so-called Indo-European peoples, who writhe in torment as a result of these incredible plans undoubtedly originating in the first place from the muddled minds of the money masters or their agents, fast dwindle to a fraction of the world’s population; soon, as may very well come to pass, to be entirely obliterated by those other races of the world who watch with glee this self-destruction of those who they had so recently believed to be one with the gods, such was their seeming superiority...

 

International Money Power, whatever it really is, or whoever they really are, could not care less !... Herein was its own design...

But one thing such designers of all this forget... In the magnitude of the total disaster that looms so threateningly in these last days over the path of life, is also final disaster to the planners of this evil; whether this they had expected or otherwise; their own complete obliteration for sure along with the rest.

For if God’s kingdom on earth is to arise, it is to arise in a world where little of the sicknesses that trouble us today, will be left, and the binding threads of incompetent thinking, and of evil itself, will be totally unwound.

 

It will arise where the humble and the meek, such as remain, bow down in total acceptance of that natural order as was ordained:

• of god, which is the self-conscious everlasting itself

• of priest-king in whom is the voice of god reigning in earthly glory understandable to men

• of priesthood trained to total understanding of all the forces which mould men, and the devoted themselves, those who go about their affairs trusting in the sincerity and ability of their rulers, and who seek no more in life than the glory of their eternal master, and that they themselves always walk in the ways of righteousness

Thus, returning to Athens and its money in ancient days: the emission by the bankers of Athens of the baked clay facsimiles of the silver coinage they were reputed to have in storage in the vaults of the Acropolis, would have exactly the same effect on prices as the emission of silver coin; it would cause them to rise.

 

Conversely, contraction of that clay coinage by calling of loans, would similarly cause prices to fall; and thus, as in today, “when the depression is over,” that is when prices are at rock bottom without totally wrecking the state, the “Banker” merely enters a few figures in his ledger to the credit of one of his agents, so it was in Athens in that day. did the so-called customer require ready money over and above the money required for settlement of balances owing, such as could be met by debit, and transfer, and recredit, i.e., by cheque, then the so-called bankers at Athens or the Piraeus, merely set slaves to work to cast and bake clay coins as fast as they could go!

 

Admittedly the baking of clay coins was a little more expensive than the pen and ink required for ledger entry money, or than the high speed printing press necessary for the paper facsimiles of today...

Hence the enormous potential for the accumulation of wealth by a banker in a city state engaged in manufacture, and whose merchants and captains depended on him alone for their finances, especially when their business was largely with foreign parts.

According to Professor Ure,⁽⁴⁵⁾ the tyrants of the city states derived their power from the new form of capital known as money. While in agreement with the general idea of Professor Ure, it must be asked: Why new form of capital? Metal money as capital, or what?... It may be assumed that those references to baked clay, leather and wooden money in ancient Rome previous to Numa Pompilius, the first by Suidas, the second by Seneca, and the third by Cedrenus, also applied to ancient Greece; especially if the conjecture in respect to the leather monopoly of the Hittite state is correct.⁽⁴⁶⁾

 

Suidas makes reference to leather money at Lacedaemon. There is no reason why other Greek city states should not have availed themselves of such readily obtainable material ⁽⁴⁷⁾ (and cheap at that!) in those days before the augmentation of bullion supplies internationally by the new methods of mining, and the massive wars which gave rise to plentiful supplies of expendable labor.

It seems to be reasonable that the money that enabled those industries that grew up in early Greece to get off the ground, as it were, was of such relatively intrinsically valueless material. Behind every industrialist was a banker, and the banker had to be the secret heart of the city.

 

The early use of precious metal coinage in Greece had to have been similar to its use in Babylonia a thousand years before, or as gold in Britain 2000 years later, a standard on which to base prices and establish confidence in the “Great Banker” as being a wealthy man; a base on which a pyramid of ledger credit page money might be erected, represented in the circulation by leather notes, clay tokens, etc.

As Stanley Jevons remarked in our era in 1914:

“Gold already acts in England only as small change for notes” ⁽⁴⁸⁾...

In a similar manner with money based on a silver standard, yet relatively little silver in circulation, such silver would have acted as small change in those ancient times. For evidence of greater wealth, leather notes, or clay tokens, or documents denoting cattle, which indeed may have been currency in large scale transactions, seem more likely to have served, at least amongst the Indo-Europeans.

Thus right from the start it is safe to say that silver functioned as a balancing factor in oral and written agreements of merchandise exchange in Greece, actually functioning as a circulating medium itself only after King Pheidon of Argos.

 

Although some authorities ⁽⁴⁹⁾ say that the silver coinage was of state issuance, whether it was or was not, would make little difference.

 

In so-called democracies, money power cannot but be the force behind the scenes. For that matter, anyone finding the paper notes of the British Empire three thousand years from now, because of the myth of the Queen’s Head and the Coat of Arms, would assume it too was state issue. They would of course be entirely wrong.

 

Ever since the establishment of that ever changing mirage of the precious metal money system, states and rulers that became corrupted and undermined by the extraordinary deceptions to which such system loaned itself, wittingly or unwittingly, have fronted for those persons, often of criminal background, sometimes designated bankers, who under their very noses, have operated the most unbelievable swindles...

 

It is hard to believe that states and rulers have been aware of the magnitude of the folly they commit in permitting private persons to exercise that power which is theirs as being representative of their peoples before God.

 

Assuming ruler and temple lend their sanction, it is not long before the so-called banker, now able to finance an opposition to any power it is in his interest to destroy, or indeed, to withdraw financing from such power whose destruction he seeks, can literally laugh at those people, foolish, corrupt, or naïve, who, in lack of understanding of the meaning and source of that which was their strength and power, raised him up in the first place...

Once the power of monetary emission is yielded by a ruler or state to private or external interests, it is rare that it can be recovered except as the result of all consuming cataclysm.

 

Immense monopolies and vastly unequal money fortunes are neither gained nor saved by lawful labor or trade. Of necessity they are the natural outcome of the exercise of the power to discriminate, the power to reject or prefer that follows as inevitable consequence, when, in any state, private persons are permitted to create and issue the unit of exchange, whether tangible or abstract; and by whatever device of law such as may be needed to create appearance of legality.

So far as the future of mankind is concerned, out of the deceit it practices on the simple, kind, and trusting, this instrument will be responsible for the complete enslavement and ultimate destruction of most, if not all, of this world. The hands that guide it are declared by themselves to be malevolent, and wittingly function and exert themselves in defiance of the natural order of life with their hearts full of pride and prejudice as for themselves as being some special breed, when merely they are but unfaithful stewards...

 

Contempt for those who front for them in their secret conspiracy or are destroyed by it, shows equally in the arrogance of their manner...

In the words of W. Cleon Skousen reviewing the great and compendious work of Dr. Carroll Quigley Tragedy And Hope, according to Dr. Skousen the most authentic and detailed account of the modern day conspiracy:

“As I see it, the great contribution which Dr. Carroll Quigley unintentionally made by writing Tragedy and Hope was to help the ordinary American realize the utter contempt which the network leaders have for ordinary peoples. Human beings are treated en masse as helpless puppets on an international chessboard where giants of economic and political power subject them to wars, revolution, civil strife, confiscation, subversion, indoctrination, manipulation and outright deception as it suits their fancy and their concocted schemes for world domination.” ⁽⁵⁰⁾

...For the original Rothschild (Amschel) who uttered that now famous line:

“Let me issue and control a Nation’s money, and I care not who writes its laws,” ⁽⁵¹⁾ one cannot but have some grudging admiration, rogue though he was and should have been dealt with as such.

But for those place-seeking persons, cynical or merely naïve, who nowadays prostrate themselves before the doors of the international bankers, as members of the societies dedicated to One World Government, such as The Council on Foreign Relations, The Canadian Institute of International Affairs, The Royal Institute of International Affairs, etc. one can have little respect.

The first requisite for a man to be truly honored amongst the people is that he bestow honor... Amongst these to whom the paths of meaningless ambition come first before any concern for their own, for they are largely drawn from that class of dead souls that is international in this, that every race and people on this earth is afflicted by them in more or less degree, the word honor too often will be meaningless...

 

According to another recent writer:

“James P. Warburg is one of the most ardent propagandists and financiers of the World Government Movement in the U.S.A. today... This same James Warburg had the audacity and arrogance to proclaim before the U.S. Senate (2-17-50):

‘We shall have world government whether or not we like it. The only question is, whether world government will be achieved by Conquest or Consent.’” ⁽⁵²⁾

World Government is total government world-wide in which no independent race or people shall be except the rulers, who necessarily will have to be an exclusive caste.

 

Total consent of all presumptuous, if not imaginative, bankers will never be; but out of the weakness and confusion created by them amongst us towards these their own vain purposes, the world Government they mutter about, may come through conquest, though it is not they who will be the conquerors, though indeed, they will be the principal instrument.

 

There would be no way of bringing about that total monopoly of money, industry and empire, which is world government, save through the manipulation of the credulity of man-kind, and the pathetic trust he still maintains that his rulers are the voice of God on earth for him, as he blindly stumbles on, except it be by armed conquest.

 

Armed conquest in its turn in these latter days, cannot be effected without the connivance of conspiratorial money power, although such conspiratorial money power in its virtually insane search for paths towards its own establishment towards World Rule forever and ever, has now become an institution, which in the horror of the weapons of total destruction and obliteration leading to final subjection that it has called into being, and, in its blindness, has also given to our enemies, can only be described as a juggernaut completely out of control, an all-engulfing Terror, as much for its creators, as he, who, in its original conception, such Terror was supposed to engulf...
 

 

References

1. See P. 17, present work. Also Note 2, P. 28.

2. "Après avoir bien constaté l’existence avant Pheidon, de ces saumons ou broches de fer qui était la monnaie courant de Peloponnes, il nous sera facile de définir nettement le rôle de ce prince. Il ne fut pas l’inventeur de la monnaie mais seulement, comme servius tullius, un réformateur. il introduisit dans le péloponnèse un système fixé des poids et mesures, a la place des systèmes multiples qui jetaient la confusion et la désordre dans les relations commerciales; il adapta le poids des nouvelles monnaie au systèmes pondéral nouveau; il demoneta et aboli officiellement la vieille et encombrante monnaie de fer dont il consacra quelques échantillons dans le temple d’Argos”. Les Origines de la Monnaie," P. 211, Ernest Babelon, Paris, 1897.

3. François Lenormant: La Monnaie dans l’antiquité, pp. 215-216, Book II, Tome I.

4. Kingston-Higgins & Paul Einzig: A Survey of Primitive Money and Primitive Money, respectively.

5. Fritz Heichelheim: An Ancient Economic History, P. 478, Vol. I.

6. Robert Payne: The Gold of Troy, P. 199.

7. Christopher Dawson: The Age of the Gods, P. 255.

8. The kings of the dynasty ruling in Lydia until 689 B.C., or Phrygia as it may then have been, of which Myrsilus (or Candaules) was the last, mostly bore Hittite names. According to Del Mar in his History of Monetary Systems, P. 41, the Phrygian (or Lydian) chronicles extend back to 1300 B.C. (when Bog-Haz Koi and Troy still existed).

According to Professor W.F. Albright, (The Amarna Letters from Palestine, Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. II; P. 43.) “ the Hittites had established several vassal states in northern Syria”... “at least two of them, Carchemish and Aleppo, were ruled by princes of the imperial Hittite dynasty. In a third state, Khattina, the reigning princes still bore names derived from imperial Hittite history as late as the ninth century b.c...."

9. Although the fall of Bog-Haz Koi undoubtedly ended forever the system of empire over which the kings of the Kheta presided, fragments established local autonomy thereafter. Such fragments were the state of Khattina above mentioned and the cities of Marqasi, and Carchemish.

10. Livy; Book I.

11. Christopher Dawson: Age of the Gods, P. 304; London; 1928.

12. E.J. Haeberlin: Aes Grave; Frankfurt; 1910.

13. Accepting the opinion of Mommsen however, the Aes Grave dates from 454 B.C.-430 B.C. Manuel Des Antiquités Romaines. Tome X. Paris; 1888.

14. François Lenormant: La Monnaie dans l’Antiquité, P. 66, Book II, Tome I.

15. Livy: Book I; (Aubrey de Selincourt: An Early History of Rome, P. 66; London; 1960).

16. The Aes Rude.

17. Augustus Boeckh: The Public Economy of Athens, Vol. I; P. 43; London; 1828.

18. According to Aeschines:

“the Carthaginians make use of the following kind of money; in a small piece of leather a substance is wrapped of the size of a piece of 4 drachmae (3s); but what this substance is no one knows except the maker. after this is sealed and issued for circulation; and he who possesses the most of this is regarded as having the most money, and as being the wealthiest man. but if any one amongst us had ever as much, he would be no richer than if he possessed a quantity of pebbles.”

(A.J. Church: Carthage, pp. 122-123; New York; 1914.)

19. R.A.G. Carson: Coins, Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, P. 75; London; 1962.

20. Plato: The Laws, Book V.

21. Aristotle: The Politics, I, 9.

22. Aristotle: The Ethics, V, 5.

23. A. del Mar: A History of Money in Ancient Countries, P. 323; London; 1885.

24. A. del Mar: A History of Money in Ancient Countries, P. 323; London; 1885.

25. According to Harold Mattingly, (Roman Coins, P. 53):

“the bronze coinage of Rome was the original coinage of the land; it always served the home market and played little part in rome’s expansion abroad: it is perhaps not surprising then that it resisted change more persistently than the world currency of the denarius.”

26. Both Cicero (Pro Flaccus; Orationes; Book XXVIII), and Pliny (Naturalis Historia, xii, c.18), make mention of this flow of silver Eastward. Cicero says that gold moved Eastward to the temple at Jerusalem. This may also have been so.

27. A. del Mar: Barbara Williers or a History of Monetary Crimes; pp. 8-44.

28. A. del Mar: Money and Civilization, p. 303; London; 1886.

29. Fritz Heichelheim: An Ancient Economic History, P. 251; Vol. I.

30. Potter: Antiquities of Greece.

31. Plato: The Laws, Book V.

32. W. Jacob: An Historical Enquiry into the Production and Consumption Metals. Del Mar, quoting from this book, gives a most reasonable analysis of the apparent loss associated with the working of the silver mines of New Carthage in Spain, by the Carthaginians. (A. del Mar: History of the Precious Metals, P. 68.)

33. Xenophon: A Discourse upon improving the Revenues of the State of Athens, (Pages 317-322, The Political and Commercial Works of Charles Davenant LLD; 1771)

34. François Lenormant: La Monnaie dans l’Antiquité, pp. 215-216, Book II, Tome I. Several Athenian and Corinthian residents have these clay coins in their possession (N. Boucara of Corinth).

35. In London 2000 years later, when the goldsmiths operated exactly the same “racket", the confidence of the public was gained through the connivance, witting or unwitting, of the Royal House, and the storage of the goldsmiths reserves in the Tower of London. The fact of their being in the Tower offered the same sanctity to the goldsmith’s practice of issuing receipts as against non-existing reserves, i.e., fraudulent receipts, as had been offered to similar practice in ancient times by the undoubted storage of the reserves of the trapezitae in the Acropolis.... In either case to encourage the circulation of his receipts, he could plead the difficulties and the dangers of the formalities attached to withdrawal of the metal itself for the purpose of settlement of an account.

36. Charles Seltsman, M.A.: Greek Coins, P. 179; London; 1933.

37. Royal Ontario Museum Display.

38. From the time of the Institution of the Financial Reforms of Lycurgus.

39. Mikhail I. Rostovtsev: A Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World, P. 108; Vol I, Oxford; 1941.

40. Ibid. P. 106.

41. Ibid. P. 108.

42. Ibid. P. 104.

43. Perhaps an internationally functioning unit like the Euro-Dollar, originating from that form of ledger entry money known as the “swap” deposit.

While doing the world’s business, relative to the work it does, it bears little relationship to the workings of the originating financial system. Such “swap” deposit money, although it will buy a loaf of bread or, at the other end of the scale, a ship, and therefore is money as much as any other kind of money, originates free of control of governments or central banks. Such Euro-currencies “can expand by the process of money creation without infusions from oil nations or payments deficits."

 

Clearly they largely exist more as a special convenience to a certain group of people whose “business” is manipulating world currencies, and therefore prices, for their own needs and profit without reference to the good or authority of the state that permits the generating of such externally circulating monetary units, or to the good of its peoples. For a detailed explanation of the Euro-Dollar see Report of the Royal Commission on Banking and Finance. pp. 138-140; Ottawa; 1964.

44. Augustus Boeckh: The Public Economy of Athens, Vol. I; P. 43; London; 1828.

45. P.N. Ure, M.A.: The Origins of Tyranny, P. 2; New York; 1922.

46. P. 155. Present Work.

47. "the Smithsonian report for 1876, p. 399, mentions clay stamps for printing cotton cloths (in ancient times). these could scarcely have failed to suggest baked clay coins such as were used in China, Chaldea, und Egypt.” History of Money in America, P. 44. A. del Mar (in reference to Mexican money).

48. He might have added, pursuing the matter further, that the paper note of today merely act as small change for that abstract money created by the mass of cheques in transit, and behind which exists no more than the misappropriated will of the gods themselves.

49. C.M Kraay & Max Hirmer: Greek Coins, Preface. London; 1968.

50. W. Cleon Skousen: The Naked Capitalist, P. 112.

51. John R. Elsom: Lightning over the Treasury Building, P. 78.

52. W.B. Vennard: Conquest or Consent, P. 12.

Back to Contents






SPARTA, THE PELANORS, WEALTH, AND WOMEN

Sparta, of all the Greek States, is one that resisted most of all, in ancient times, the encroachments of international money power, and the circulation of precious metals, and all those demoralizing factors deriving therefrom.

 

However, from those laws promulgated by Lycurgus in Sparta, reputedly during the ninth Century B.C., but, as according to the archaeologists, the early sixth century B.C.,⁽¹⁾ it would seem that all those evils deriving from giving such international money power free rein, had already been experienced, and had brought about that reaction amongst the people generally that enabled Lycurgus to take those measures by which he expunged forever the main causes of the sickness of greed and self-interest which ate at the heart of the Doric overlord class of the Peloponnese.

 

To him ⁽²⁾ are ascribed those laws directed towards this purpose such as are described by Plutarch:

“Not contented with this (redistribution of land) he resolved to make a division of their movables too, that there might be no odious distinction or inequality left among them; but finding it would be very dangerous to go about it openly, he took another course and defeated their avarice by the following stratagem: he commanded that all gold and silver coin should be called in, and that only a sort of money of iron should be current, a great weight and quantity of which was very little worth.

 

So that to lay up twenty or thirty pounds, there was required a pretty large closet, and to remove it, nothing less than a yoke of oxen. With the diffusion of this money, at once a number of vices were banished from Lacedaemon for who would rob another of such coin? Who would unjustly detain or take by force or accept as a bribe, a thing which was not easy to hide or a credit to have, or indeed of any use to cut in pieces. For when it was red-hot they quenched it in vinegar, and by that means spoilt it and made it almost incapable of being worked.

In the next place he declared an outlawry of all superfluous arts; but here he might have spared his proclamation; for they of themselves would have gone after the gold and silver, the money which remained being not so proper payment for curious work, for being iron it was scarcely portable, neither if they should take the means to export it, would it pass among the other Greeks who ridiculed it.

 

So now there was no means of purchasing foreign goods and small wares, no itinerate fortune teller, no harlot monger, or gold or silver smith, engraver or jeweler set foot in a country which had no money; so that luxury deprived little by little of that which fed and fomented it, wasted to nothing, and died away of itself.

 

For the rich had no advantage here over the poor as their wealth and abundance had no road to come abroad by, but were shut up at home doing nothing.” ⁽³⁾

Plutarch, of course, lived in a city and in an age when all wealth was assessed in terms of precious metals by weight.

 

Needless to say, in order to have the cooperation of the real ruler, local money creative power, towards the publication of his works, he wisely followed that trend which undoubtedly had been instigated in Athens of making a mockery of Spartan customs, a trend which is still followed to this day by many so called scholars.

 

Sparta, early in the Millennium had come to understand the real significance of precious metal money, as being part of an international confidence game. Sparta also realized the destructive forces inherent in the activities of its controllers and the foreign luxury traders they encouraged and financed in order to debilitate the people, and so make absolute their own secret hegemony, such as destroyed all racial pride in that people on whom they were battening, and thus destroying their will to resist through creating obsession with pleasure.

 

The evidence is in the findings of the British School at Athens from their excavations at the site of the city of Sparta:

“The excavations of the British School at Athens at the site of the city of Sparta reveal a flourishing state of the arts and manufactures in Laconia carried on, if not wholly by Laconian workmen themselves, at least by foreign artists who were welcome and encouraged to ply their crafts without any of the dark suspicion of strangers that was so marked in latter times.” ⁽⁴⁾

The so-called Spartan way of life derived from the necessity of the Spartans to always be prepared for total war from abroad, as their final rejection of international money power made certain would come, and to be always prepared for war from within; i.e., insurrection; an equal certainty deriving from the same causes.

The First Messenian War (736-716 B.C.) was entered into by King Theopompus of Sparta for the usual reasons for any war in a state indicated by archaeological findings as being under the thumb of international money power: instigation by that money power in favor of its arms industry and its other long range purposes. The long drawn out character of the war indicated that the Messenians had equal access to international arms industry with Sparta.

 

Armies are not raised and maintained in long drawn out wars without finances acceptable in international trade and ready access to the best of weapons and equipment; and it is clear the Messenians were not short of such...

 

This war served that purpose most desirable to money power of reducing the power of kings:

“The first and second Messenian wars were both followed by constitutional crises. The first settlement was a victory of the Spartan peers over the kings and a curbing of royal prerogatives and powers.” ⁽⁵⁾

Such would have been typical of the progress of international money power in its usual insidious takeover of any state or civilization.

“...The crisis after the second Messenian war was at least within the ranks of the Spartans themselves, a democratic one, if that very dubious word can be used.” ⁽⁶⁾

The long drawn out character of the second Messenian War indicated the same underlying factor of the original war of conquest: international money-power extending its favors to both sides, to the insurgents and to Sparta.

 

The final edicts of Lycurgus as a result of the constitutional crisis that followed the second Messenian war, certainly indicate he was aware of the loss of sovereignty that came to any state that based its money system on the product of the international bullion brokers, and which meant dependence on their good graces; the more especially if such state had no mines of its own.

The Second Messenian war which was doubtless to have established total “Democracy”, that is, total rule of the international banking fraternity, failed so far as such purpose was concerned. Lycurgus’s answer to a man who insisted he create a democracy in the state was “First create a democracy in your own house.”

 

Certainly an apt answer!

The complaint of Theognis, admirer of Sparta, visitor from Megara, whose political aim was directed towards the prevention of the recurrence of a Tyranny at Megara, should not be forgotten, and bore light on the conditions at Sparta, as well, and that gave rise to Lycurgus:

“Tradesmen reign supreme, the bad lord it over their betters,
This is the lesson that all must thoroughly master...” ⁽⁷⁾

Of the reforms of Lycurgus, their cause, and those forces they were directed against, there is no doubt whatsoever, and verification through the findings of archaeology such as the work of Dr. Blakeway in Laconia reestablishes the time as being, as remarked above, after the second Messenian war, namely between 600 B.C. and 550 B.C.

“He has demonstrated from archaeological evidence that between 600 B.C. and 550 B.C., foreign imports into Sparta practically ceased. Corinthian pottery which had been common in Sparta in the early or Proto-Corinthian period is exceedingly rare after c.600 B.C. Ivory, amber, Egyptian scarabs, and Phoenician goods likewise cease before 550 B.C. and the same is true of gold and silver jewellery.” ⁽⁸⁾

There is no doubt that early in the sixth century B.C., the Spartans totally excluded the international money market, such as controlled the rest of Greece through silver and gold money, and the banker’s practices relating thereto. They also excluded foreign trade as being equally destructive of the order of life they wished to preserve.

The notion created by Plutarch of that national currency of iron as being something ridiculous and requiring also an ox-cart may be dismissed as part of the steady stream of propaganda no doubt being created in Athens against everything of ancient days, particularly the customs special to Sparta.

 

If it is true that the Pelanors were of such weight as ruled out their being readily passed from hand to hand, then it may reasonably be assumed that they denoted wealth in much the same manner as the stone rings of Uap and the ancient Indus Valley civilization;⁽⁹⁾ more in the nature of a reserve, the circulating money being the leather notes referred to by Suidas as circulating in Lacedaemon, just as the circulating money of Uap was shell strings, similar to Tekaroro of the Gilbert Islands.⁽¹⁰⁾

 

It may equally have been a system whose origins were lost in remote ages; perhaps bearing relationship to that system existing in Europe during the 4th Millennium B.C.,⁽¹¹⁾ when it is clear that the Spondylus shell had greater significance than that ascribed to it as “Prestige Possession”, and was part of a world wide use of shells as money.

Sparta was indeed fortunate to possess considerable reserves of iron ore, the principal deposits being at the Malean Cape and the Taenarian Promontory.⁽¹²⁾ Thus, both for her money and for her arms, she was therefore independent, and needed no assistance from abroad.

 

The Laws of Lycurgus excluding international money and trade, directly continued the fomentation of that warlike spirit and racial and national pride bred in the Spartans out of the trials of the long drawn out Messenian wars; and which brought them in as saviors at Thermopylae, and, indeed, of Carthage at the end of the first Punic War (255 B.C.) when the army of Regulus encamped before the city was destroyed by Xantippus the Spartan.

The very fact that the power of the kings had been undermined by the first Messenian War, although their position as absolute leaders of the people in war still existed, became a blessing in disguise. History has shown that the point to which international money power immediately gravitates when penetrating any people living in natural order, is the top, the king himself, either directly, or through the priesthood.

 

Given his sanction and connivance in respect to their schemes, then peoples whose very souls have leaned towards the king as to the Lord’s anointed, are easily subdued, and their minds filled with arithmetical calculations and obsession with their animal needs, instead of that great glory of a oneness with the Deity, a oneness with the harmony of the universe, and their being lords of their own world with dominion over all other life...

One of the first steps of such money power towards total assumption of rule has been the eradication of kings and kingly power. Even though a king might be lead into connivance with the banker’s schemes, through lack of understanding, he always could still awaken and discover his mistake, and realizing the sword was still in his hand, take measures to regain his prerogative.

 

Therefore he had to be disposed of, or reduced to paid and willing servant.

In Sparta there seems to have been another obstacle to the promoters of that “Phony” democracy advocated by international money power, namely the Ephorate whose existence was undoubtedly linked to that national money power of Sparta as instituted, or reinstituted under the protection of Lycurgus.

 

Of the Ephors it may be said their main objectives were:

“first the maintenance of home defense and limiting of Spartan dominion to Messenia and Laconia (i.e. no imperial entanglements).⁽¹³⁾ Second, the fostering of a steady policy which lead to intervention in the struggle at Athens with the Peisistratids, and the expulsion of the family; third an unrelenting hostility to the pretensions of royal power in the state...”...

 

“The Ephorate was a profoundly democratic institution that feared and fought against tyranny both within and without the borders of Lacedaemon.” ⁽¹⁴⁾

Accepting the tyrant as front man of those alien agents of international money power, the trapezitae, in which category the Peisistratids certainly fell, then the meaning of the policies of the Ephorate becomes clear; with the limiting of Spartan dominion to Messenia and Laconia, was the establishment of an area from which Spartans could derive total economic freedom, sufficient to maintain themselves, and that which above all maintained their way of life and its source, their national monetary system.

The intervention at Athens and the total opposition to the Peisistratids was obvious policy in view of the unrelenting pressure of Athenian money power as a branch of International Money Power, against Sparta, city that had made mockery of the power of the counting houses of the world financial centers, and had set up example in the world which would become inspiration to others.

 

The hostility to kingly power by the Ephorate, would be guided by what they doubtless saw was the need, if their national life was to be maintained, of making sure that kings in no way had the power to surrender themselves, and the people they represented, to the blandishments of international money power, whose opportunity, alas! has always been a weak and ill-instructed king.

 

However the remark of Archidamos, King of Sparta at the commencement of the “Great” Peloponnesian war reveals, even at that day, 428 B.C. how the corruptive forces outpouring from Babylonia, with its immediate agents, had certainly reentered Sparta to some degree.

“And war is not so much a matter of armaments as of the money that makes armaments effective.” ⁽¹⁵⁾

In his speech to his own people Archidamos also warns them of the 6000 talents war chest supposedly held by the Athenians in the Acropolis.

 

Both of these statements show no understanding of that in which a king should above all be instructed, National Monetary Emission, and prove how right were the Ephors in the controls with which they surrounded kingship...

 

Archidamos privately was close friend of Pericles, scion of the Alkmeonidae, whose destiny, Greek history shows, to have always been closely linked to that of international money power.

During the period when the national currency of Sparta maintained its integrity, it might be safe to say that the Spartan, in so far as it is possible for true freedom to exist, was a free man. Indeed the helots were more than likely more free by a long way than are the laboring classes of this day.

 

And certainly more free than those classes of the semi-mass production lines of the other Greek Cities, whose monetary systems were almost all, whether fiduciary and of state issue or not, at the mercy of the bankers, and therefore the manipulators of the value of bullion and slaves, wherever it was they maintained their centre; generally assumed to be Babylonia and its outposts, Lydia, and Naucratis in the Nile Delta, and Phoenicia, and Athens, and Cyzicus and Colchis and many other cities in key positions to trade with the world beyond...

A monetary system, simple, inviting neither peddlers of luxury, panders or pornographers to make mockery of the lives of the people, issued and regulated by a benevolent state, and undoubtedly with its units paid into circulation with care and attention to the result on the national well-being and strength, bred a sturdy independent people completely contemptuous of the gold madness raging elsewhere.

 

They were an example by which other great peoples came to profit, outstandingly the Romans. They lived with a feeling of great superiority to the Athenians, who, while having a plentiful currency, except during the periods of exhaustion of the Laureion silver mines, were exposed to all the evils of control over their political life by alien money power through the trapezitae.

History gives much information about the means whereby money was collected and raised and spent, but nothing as to those shadowy figures who institute its units in the first place, and, as in the case of the banker’s “democracies”, inject them into the circulation.

As to when international money power reentered Sparta, there is little enough evidence. But the outlook of King Archidamos suggested it had made quite some progress by the date of the commencement of the Peloponnesian war, and it may be safely said that to win that war, out of which could come nothing but gain to international money power, Sparta had to make almost total concession.

 

The final victory over Athens and her Empire, which ended the war, achieved the purposes of the international bullion and slave traders as surely as final defeat would so have done. As it will be remembered, the relaxation and luxury that inundated Rome after the second Punic war, as a result of the concessions that had been made to international bullion and slave traders in order to be able to re-arm after Cannae, and ultimately drive Hannibal out of Italy, and defeat him in his own territory, within 25 years dragged the Romans down ⁽¹⁶⁾ to a debauched money mad mob, though still mighty through the employment at arms of the defeated peoples.

Similarly, after the Peloponnesian War, like causes had done the same for Sparta, and it was but 25 years later, in 371 B.C., the Spartan Phalanx, softened to the core, crumbled into bloody ruin at Leuctra, to Epaminondas the Theban and never again recovered the élan that had made it the victor of a hundred battles, for the Spartans now, more than any, were consumed by the corrupting diseases of money madness and its attendant liberalism.

That by 360 B.C., the ancient money system that had been the factor behind the morale of the Spartan of Thermopylae was little more than a memory, is revealed by the following quotation taken from Alexander Del Mar:

“The crime of Gylipus, B.C. 360 and the decree offered upon its exposure, viz. ‘That no coin of gold or silver be admitted into Sparta, but that they should use the money that had formerly obtained,’ shows that as this decay of the state and weakening of credit went on, gold or silver coins, at or near their bullion value, gradually crept into circulation as money. The failure of the decree to pass is conclusive that the iron numerical system was no longer practicable.” ⁽¹⁷⁾

In other words, the damage to that which had been Sparta and its people done by the ruler who first of all turned a blind eye to dealings in the precious metals, the re-growth of international trade, and no doubt the holding of deposits in Athenian Banks, and who failed to deal with ferocity with those who interfered with the Pelanors either by counterfeiting or speculation, was irreparable. It seemed this time the clock could not be turned back...

Thus while Sparta finally collapsed before the unremitting pressure of the Athenian, or better put, the international money market, seeming to yield its ancient strength and the sources of its independence, the Athens that carried on, as well, partly for reasons as elsewhere given, was but a shadow of itself with the approach of the exhaustion of the mines, and thence the failure of the base of its money power and the “confidence” essential to its maintenance...

 

Moreover, still in the hands of the bankers as a centre of trade for trade’s sake, Athens was become but a name.

 

As with Rome by the time of the Civil Wars, its original people had disappeared into that mass of freed slaves, and immigrants from elsewhere, the “sojourners”, who were now a large part of the Athenian population, and for whose leaders Xenophon the journalist obviously fronted when he proposed that special taxes should be lifted from foreigners who at the same time were not to be required to do military service.⁽¹⁸⁾

 

(Here it might be remarked that it is perhaps unfortunate that should still survive the writings of a paid propagandist, so similar to the writings of some of his brethren today, when so little remains of Greek literature relative to the total output.)

Of Spartan money as reinstituted under the patronage of Lycurgus, Ernest Babelon, famous French Numismatist of the 19th Century, wrote:

“A long time after the use of money had been spread throughout the Hellenic world, Sparta continued as through tradition, to make use of ingots of iron as a means of exchange. These bars were known under the description of (gâteau de pâtisserie). Each one weighed an Aeginetic Mina, and to carry only six of them, that is to say about 536 Kg., a wagon drawn by two oxen was required.

 

This information supplied to us by Xenophon and Plutarch agrees with that from central Italy where cumbersome bars of bronze were carried in carts; 'Aes Grave plaustris quidam convehentes,’ said Titus Vivius.

 

All kinds of stories circulated on the subject of the famous Pelanors of Sparta that seem to have remained in use until the Persian Wars. It was said, for instance that the iron used in the manufacture of this money was unsuitable for any other purpose and was rendered brittle by an operation consisting of heating it until red-hot, then quenching it in vinegar. In the conservative capital of Laconia it appears that these ingots of iron were the sole money in use and all citizens were forbidden under penalty of death to possess any other money...

 

When Epaminondas died he was so poor that nothing was found in his house in the way of wealth other than an old iron. At Thebes the native land of Epaminondas where money was known and struck at an early date, found in the residence of the hero could have no more than a superstitious character.

This surprises us less especially as since the 7th century, Pheidon, King of Argos, when he struck the first silver money of Aegina, and introduced a standard system of weights and measures into the Peloponnese, withdrew the former iron spits from circulation that had served as money until then, and consecrated a certain number of samples, “in Ex-voto”, in the sanctuary of Hera at Argos. At the time of Aristotle they could still be seen in the Temple.” ⁽¹⁹⁾

Babelon, most learned scholar as he was, however reflects the complacent attitude of the bankers of the end of the last century, which was founded on the idea, such had been their luck during the previous century, that their millennium had finally come.

 

With him, money was precious metal, and precious metal was money. Although of interest, his information, a repetition of Xenophon the journalist and Plutarch, offers not much more light. Though over two thousand years had gone by, precious metal money and its promoters still ruled, despite a dozen great kingdoms and empires having risen at its behest and having fallen at its behest.

 

Did Babelon see the shadow which lurked behind the throne, he closed his eyes and turned his head away..!

Lycurgus was without doubt inspired to reestablish this national monetary system by the clear understanding he must have come to have of the evil effects of this gold and silver madness, and its disastrous effects as a result of the operations of the trapezitae or bankers, relative to the destruction of national morale and being.

 

Precious metal coinage was currency whose total circulation the state could in no way control because of the desirability of its material internationally. In the common money market of the silver bullion brokers it was material, which, whether minted into money by state authority or otherwise, produced a money always of value regardless of local convention. Its value was dictated by the arbitrary decision of that international fraternity who controlled its mining, and the slaves that mined it, and out of manipulation of that pyramid of abstract money they created thereon, controlled the political affairs of states...

The money that had been established in Sparta was of value to Spartans alone... Although no record exists of such matter, it may be safely assumed that the Pelanors and the leather multiples or divisibles of Suidas, entered the circulation as against state indebtedness; thus reducing taxation, that vicious destroyer of peoples, to relatively negligible amounts.

 

Their pitted and otherwise worthless appearance deriving from their being immersed in vinegar when red hot, made them of no value for any other purpose than that for which they were intended. The use of this national money was the force that gave Sparta the leadership of Hellas until the end of the Peloponnesian War, even if decline had commenced with the execution of the great General Pausanias ⁽²⁰⁾ by the Ephors in 479 B.C., and was that which necessarily dictated the policy of the extirpation of the tyrannies; the tyrant always being representative for the agent of international money creative power through precious metal control...

 

There might be temptation to assume the Pelanors were a system of “Iron Greenbacks”. But while they resembled the “Greenbacks” in this that they were the total will to be of the Spartans,⁽²¹⁾ assuming the truth of their great weight, as pointed out above, they may have been more in the character of that monetary system of very ancient days of which the stone rings of Uap are a last remaining evincement.

A healthy wholesome people who controlled totally their state and existence would have little reason to accumulate money fortunes, and wealth as distinct from the land which was their patrimony; and as such money fortunes begin and end as little more than figures in the banker’s ledger, nor could they be guided into becoming mouthpieces for the policies of the bankers...

 

Meals were eaten in common amongst men as in Carthage of earlier days, and a genuine contempt for luxury existed.

 

A simple life was not sought after, so much as it came of its own accord as a natural outcome of such monetary system created for their better and right living, and which preserved them from the encroachments of that liberalizing, demoralizing, and debt creating force of international trade, and its destructive effect on the esprit de corps of any particular race or people who are foolish enough to permit its proponents to have their way.

Although it was said of the early days of the Laws of Lycurgus and his monetary reforms that precious metals seized in War were deposited with the Arcadians, of later days Augustus Boeckh wrote of gold and silver in Sparta:

...“Sparta during a period of several generations, swallowed up large quantities of the precious metals; as in Aesop’s Fables, the footsteps of the animals which went in were to be seen, but never of those which came out. The principal cause of this stagnation was that the state kept the gold and silver in store, and only reissued them for war and foreign enterprise; although there were instances of individuals who amassed treasures according to the law.” ⁽²²⁾

Xenophon stated that Lycurgus made the privilege of citizenship equally available to all who observed what was enjoined by laws, without taking any account of weakness of body, or scantiness of means; which would mean that no Spartan suffered in respect to the mess or syssition to which he was entitled to belong, on account of economic condition. Xenophon had lived in Sparta and was writing before the loss of Messenia.

 

Aristotle who declared failure to pay dues entailed political disenfranchisement, wrote after the loss of Messenia in 370 B.C., and the certain penetration by the bankers of the Piraeus, and the assumption of control of Spartan fiscal affairs which it may safely be said, they were already conceded by an already corrupted Sparta, ready to accept any humiliation to save itself from total ruin.

 

The final military collapse at Leuctra rose from that weakened condition that followed the apparent victory of the “Great” Peloponnesian War, and those concessions that already would have been made to the international bankers, now in the Persian court, as a result of the desperate need of the Spartans for ships.

 

The loan of 5000 talents towards the building of ships which was granted to Sparta by Persia as a result of the Treaty of Miletus, 412 B.C., would not have been granted without major concessions being exacted; most likely abrogation of those Spartan edicts forbidding the sojourn of foreign traders etc. on Spartan territory. It would not take long, once such traders had been admitted, for them to undermine the morale of that which had been Sparta, by spreading the money madness, and the promotion of luxury ⁽²³⁾ and the creation of unnatural concern with sex, and body needs.

 

Of this situation Polybius, as quoted by Humphrey Michell wrote the following:

“As long as they aspired to rule over their neighbors or over the Peloponnesians alone, they found the supplies and resources furnished by Laconia itself, adequate as they had all they required ready to hand and quickly returned home whether by land or by sea.

 

But once they began to undertake naval expeditions and to make military campaigns outside the Peloponnese, it was evident that neither their iron currency nor the exchange of their crops for commodities which they lacked, as permitted by the laws of Lycurgus, would suffice for their needs.

 

These enterprises demanded a currency in universal circulation and supplies drawn from abroad, and so they were compelled to beg from the Persians, to impose tribute on the islanders, and exact taxes from all the Greeks. For they recognized that under the legislation of Lycurgus, it was impossible to aspire, I will not say to supremacy in Greece, but to any position of influence....” ⁽²⁴⁾

The fact is however, Sparta, while following the Laws of Lycurgus had dominated Greece in more or less degree.

 

As soon as she lost sight of the meaning and purpose of such laws, she became just another petty state; an agency for the subterranean control by international banking through manipulation of the silver and gold bullion basis of her currency; each man, concerned with his own need and greed, aimlessly following the pretty bubble which was the illusion of the banker’s “wealth”...

 

The old order, and that which had given them strength and national morale, was soon destroyed through the promotion of foreigners and the lower castes, and the helots, who merely took the name but not the meaning; also by the stirring up of women towards rejection of their subordinate place in life, and therefore instituting insidious attack on the natural order of the home, out of which is bred the natural order of life itself...

The later age of Aristotle, with its hard and realistic facts as referred to by some writers, was no more realistic than the earlier age of Xenophon. Rather it was less so.

 

It was the age of the triumph of those international interests whose arming and instigation of the Messenian helots in an earlier age had decided Spartans to accept that structure of law as advocated by Lycurgus, which meant surrender of so much ease of living, rather than become the same as most other Greek states, an alien money manipulators paradise, with, as Theognis of Megara put it:

“Tradesmen reigning supreme and the bad lording it over their betters.”

As the earliest finds of the clay facsimiles of precious metal coinage at Athens, seem to date around the middle of the fifth century B.C.,⁽²⁵⁾ it may be assumed that one way or the other, either through Spartans permitted to reside at Athens, or through those Spartan mercenaries who travelled the world seeking employment for their skill at arms, the lust for having, one man more than his neighbor, slowly became injected into them.

 

Perhaps Spartan mercenaries, who always required to be paid in those international currencies of silver and gold, returning from abroad via Athens, had been inveigled into depositing their pay in such gold or silver, with the bankers of the Piraeus, with whom it might “grow” from interest; taking home the baked clay coins as evidence of their account, and thus evading contravention of the Spartan laws in respect to possession of gold and silver...

With the resumption of the rule of international money power in later Spartan history, one of the most outstanding instances of that sickness rotting the fibres of their racial morale, was the tale of those Homoioi who seemed to have fallen in the social scale and were no longer able to take their places in those great messes, the syssitiones (room for communal dining), the breeding places of that esprit de corps that was Sparta.

 

Scholars give various reasons for these “disenfranchised” Spartans apparently known as the hypomeiones. The reason for their coming to be is however more than clear. They are the direct result of the power to discriminate, which is the natural outcome in favor of the banker, of that actual god-power he exercises once installed as local money creator.

More than likely after the Peloponnesian War, and certainly after the battle of Leuctra in 371 B.C., the reestablished bankers, following usual policy, would have taken care that certain families, who this caste of men instinctively realized might yet create opposition to them, were dispossessed by one means or another. With that banker created money as being now the necessary qualification for membership to the syssitiones, it was a small matter to make sure that such persons whose disenfranchisement they planned, never had enough.⁽²⁶⁾

 

Clearly in such later day, the syssition or mess charges, being assessed in silver money whose issue the bankers controlled, those to whom such alien bankers extended no favors, and therefore ultimately dispossessed through mortgage and foreclosure, not having any longer the wherewithal to pay, no longer belonged. Further, seeing their former helots raised up to place of honor and riches by bankers created wealth, and certainly by the reign of King Cleomenes III (228-219 B.C.),⁽²⁷⁾ actually sitting in their place in the syssition, little desire to retrieve such a distinctly lost cause remained.

The Spartan, whether poor or whether rich (in land), in the days of the national currency had been the social equal of any other Spartan; however, as much as anything, the slow decay of the Spartan principle derived from a most outstanding omission in the constitution which was total lack of provision for the redistribution of wealth at certain definite intervals, and the cancellation of debt as in the Hebrew custom of the 49th year.⁽²⁸⁾

Needless to say, even in the days of the national currency, there must have been tendency towards economic inequality resulting from such omission;⁽²⁹⁾ but the rapid increase of such economic inequality after the return of the bankers, that certainly followed the “Great” Peloponnesian War, additional to furthering the breakup of the caste system that previously had obtained in Sparta in some degree, and wherein each man had known his place in the order of society, also caused a further breakup in the natural order of life of Spartan man as master of home and family...

In that Spartan society wherein women had always known considerable freedom relative, say, to their Athenian sisters, the control of wealth however designated, passed substantially into the hands of women.⁽³⁰⁾

 

Concern for the growth of “Money”, no doubt, just as in this day, replaced care for their men, and concern for themselves as mothers of the race, and concern for the growth of their children.

“Two fifths of the land and wealth had come into their hands, simply because lack of men left them as heiresses, and this wealth they used extravagantly, maintaining race horses which they exhibited at the Olympic games, costly equipages and fine clothes. They meddled in the affairs of state and brought undue influence upon the conduct of the government.” ⁽³¹⁾

In such society, this stratum of wealthy women have no respect for men as such, too often. While perhaps not classified as hetaerae, who all said and done, had served some useful purpose to men, they clearly lived public lives very much the same as the hetaerae.

Such women, their heads full of figures and pride, would have served most usefully those alien money powers who ever have sought to further their purposes through corrupt and malleable persons... Women, rarely corrupt in the sense that a man may be corrupt, because of their natural need to shelter behind what seems to be strength, as arrogant Money Power would appear to them, are malleable...

 

Their own Spartan men, either dead, and if not dead, completely confused with the new liberalization program of the returned bankers, were virtually enslaved; therefore they turned for the protection they needed to what seemed to be the new strength, pudgy and gross though it may have been...



References

1. Humphrey Michell, M A: Sparta, P. 27; (Cambridge University Press; 1952.)

2. Further than the findings of archaeology, the deductions of some of the classical scholars also attribute the so-called reforms of Lycurgus to the sixth century B.C., being therein the so-called Eunomia, c 610 B.C.; clearly, therefore, either inspiring the events at Athens brought about by Solon, or being inspired thereby.

 

According to the writer on this subject in the Encyclopedia of World History. (P. 50)...

“ By the so-called Eunomia, the Spartans, fearing further revolts (of the Messenians) completely reorganized the State to make it more severely military. Youths from the age of 7 were taken for continual military training. Men of military age lived in barracks and ate at common messes (syssitia, phiditia). Five local tribes replaced the three Dorian hereditary ones and the army was correspondingly divided, creating the Dorian Phalanx.

 

In the tribes were enrolled as citizens many non-citizens. The gerousia, comprising 28 elders and the two kings, had the initiative in legislation though the apella of all citizens had the final decision. The chief magistrates, ephors were increased to five, with wider powers especially after the ephorate of Cheilon (556 B.C.). Later ages attributed the reforms (the financial sector of which is ignored by this writer) to the hero Lycurgus in the ninth century, perhaps because the new laws were put under his protection...”

3. Plutarch: Lycurgus (The Lives: Dryden Translation).

4. Humphrey Michell, M.A: Sparta; P. 12.

5. Ibid. P. 23.

6. Humphrey Michell, M.A.: Sparta, P. 23.

7. P.N. Ure, M.A.: The Origins of Tyranny, P. 8.

8. Humphrey Michell: Sparta, P. 27.

9. Paul Einzig: Primitive Money, pp. 36-40; also see E.J.C. McKay in Further Excavations at Mohanjo-Daro, P. 582.

10. Kingston-Higgins: A Survey of Primitive Money, P. 140. London; 1949.

11. Colin Renfrew: The Emergence of Civilization; pp. 483-544; London; 1972.

12. Paul Einzig: Primitive Money, P. 224; London; 1949.

13. Bracketed comment by present author.

14. Humphrey Michell, M.A.: Sparta, P. 30.

15. Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War, Book I, Ch. 6.

16. Sallust who lived from 86 B.C. to 35 B.C. drew the following picture of the state of society at that time:

“ When freed from the fear of Carthage, the Romans had leisure to give themselves up to their dissensions, then there sprang up on all sides troubles, seditions, and at last civil wars. A small number of powerful men, whose favor most of the citizens sought by base means, exercised a veritable despotism under the imposing name, sometimes of the Senate, at other times of the ' People’.

 

The title of good or bad citizen was no longer the reward of what he did for or against his country for all were equally corrupt; but the more anyone was rich, and in condition to do evil with impunity, provided he supported the present order of things, the more he passed for a man of worth.

 

From this moment the ancient manners no longer became corrupted gradually as before; but the depravation spread with the rapidity of a torrent and youth was to such a degree infected by the poison of luxury and avarice, that there came a generation of people of which it was just to say, that they could neither have patrimony nor suffer others to have it.”

Sallust: Fragm. I.12-13.

17. A. del Mar: A History of Money in Antiquity, P. 165.

18. Xenophon: A Discourse upon improving the Revenues of the State of Athens, pp. 311-13; (Trans. Charles Davenant, London, 1771).

19. "Longtemps après que l’usage de la monnaie eut été partout répandu dans le monde Hellénique, Sparte continuait par tradition, a se servir de lingots de fer comme intermédiaires des échange. Ces lingots était connu sous le nom de (gâteau de Pâtisserie). Ils pesaient chacun une mine éginétique et pour en transporter six seulement, c’est a dire environs 4536 Kg il fallait un chariot attelé de deux boeufs. Ce renseignement qui nous fournissent Xenophon et Plutarch, est conforme a ce qui se passait dans l’Italie centrale où les encombrantes lingots de bronze étaient transporté sur des chariots: “aes grave plaustris quidam convehentes ” dit Titus Vivius. Il circulait toutes sortes de fables au sujet du fameux Pelanor de Sparte, qui parait être rester en usage jusqu’a l’époque des guerres médiques: on disait par exemple que le fer destiné a fabriquer cette monnaie était impropre à tout autre usage et rendu cassant par une opération qui consistait à la faire rougir au feu et a la tremper ensuite de fer était, parait-il exclusif, et défense sous peine de morte, fur faite à tout citoyen de posséder une autre monnaie.

....Quand Epaminondas mourut il était si pauvre qu’on ne trouva dans sa maison, pour toute fortune, qu’un vieil en fer. A Thèbes, la patrie d’Epaminondas ou la monnaie fut connu et frappée de bonne heure, trouve dans la demeure du héros ne pouvait avoir qu’un caractère superstitieux. Ceci nous surprendra d’autant moins que dès le septième siècle, Phidon, roi d’Argos, lorsqu’il fit frappés un système régulier de poids et mesures, retira de la circulation les vieilles broches de fer qui auraient servit de monnaie jusqu’à là, et en consacra un certain nombres d’exemplaires en “ex-voto” dans la sanctuaire de Héra à Argos En temps de Aristotle on voyait encore dans le Temple...”

(Ernest Babelon: Les Origines de la Monnaie. P. 79; Paris; 1897.)

20. Pausanias was the commander of the fleet of the Greek allies. After his success against the Persians on land at Plataea, in the same year, 479 B.C., he reduced both Cyprus and Byzantium. According to the record, he was executed by the Ephors by being starved to death in the temple of Athena of the Brazen House, having been found guilty of (kingly) domineering which was supposed to have alienated Ionia. The real reason of his disgrace and execution would have been buried amongst the secrets of National or International money power. He had most likely entered into secret dealings with the latter. (Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War; Book I; Ch. 10.)

21. According to A. del Mar, the iron currency of the pelanors was strictly a numerical system; confined to Sparta, it was a national system having no relationship to International Standards or ratios with other metals; thus being identical in character to the “Greenback” paper money issued by President Abraham Lincoln, during the American Civil War, and by which means the schemes of the international bullion braking fraternity were temporarily frustrated.

22. Augustus Boeckh: The Public Economy of Athens, P. 43, Vol. I.

23. Aristotle: The Politics, Book II, Ch. 9.

24. Polybius VI. 49. (Humphrey Michell: Sparta, P. 305.) François Lenormant: La Monnaie dans L’Antiquité, P. 215-216; Book II, Tome I.

25. François Lenormant: La Monnaie dans L’Antiquité, P. 215-216; Book II, Tome I.

26. By corollary, those prepared to promote the bankers’ policies, however subversive or destructive, would be amply provided for... Of this period Professor A.H.M. Jones (Sparta, P. 39; Oxford; 1967) makes comment:

“After Aegospotami there was such an influx of gold and silver that the conservatives tried to revive the Lycurgan ban, and it was decided that the treasury might hold gold and silver but not individuals. Nevertheless part of the Spartiate’s mess contribution was in Aeginetan Obols”

27. Humphrey Michell, M.A.: Sparta, P. 78.

28. Leviticus; Ch. 25: (King James Version).

29. Aristotle: The Politics, Book II, Ch. 9.

30. Ibid.

31. Humphrey Michell: Sparta, P. 50.

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