Traders from all over the world, away from home, pockets full of money, made a ready market for all sorts of vices that thrived in these cities. Exposure to foreign creeds, morals, and traditions often weakened the hold of domestic religions on the citizens of the seaport towns. Lycurgus’s reforms sound a familiar refrain in the ancient literature on money, variations of the biblical warning that “the love of money is the root of all evil.” The use of money first spread in the seaport cities, such as Athens, where traders and sailors of all religions and creeds met at the crossroads of international trade. The whole tenor of these reforms, however, seems to have been intended to limit the growth of commercial activity rather than promote it. Societies sometimes develop substitute monies when the growth of commercial activity is restricted by a shortage of money. It is unlikely, but possible, that Sparta was attempting to compensate for a shortage of domestic supplies of gold and silver, possessing no gold or silver mines of its own. Part of the motivation for the reformation of Sparta’s currency may have been the discouragement of trade with foreigners, because there is no record of exchange rates between Sparta’s iron currency and the coinage of other cities of the same era. With the diffusion of this money, at once a number of vices were banished from Lacedaemon for who would rob another of such a coin? Who would unjustly detain or take by force, or accept as a bribe, a thing that it was not easy to hide, nor a credit to have, or of any use to cut in pieces? For when it was just red hot, they quenched it in vinegar, and by that means spoilt it, and made it almost incapable of being worked. Not content with this, he resolved to make a division of their moveables too, that there might be no odious distinction or inequality left amongst them but finding that 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 only a sort of money made 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. In Plutarch’s Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans (1952) we read that Lycurgus: According to Plutarch, Lycurgus, after effecting a land reform that spread out the ownership of that wealth, set to work reforming the currency. This provision was part of a plan of social reform intended to spare Sparta the evil consequences of wealth concentrated in the hands of a few citizens. Lycurgus, the famous Spartan lawgiver, put into Sparta’s constitution a provision that banned the circulation and possession of gold, silver, or other precious metals as a means of transacting business and replaced these forms of money with an iron currency, variously reported as being in the form of disc or bars. Before some time ago i had read an article from Encyclopedia of Money.Highly interesting for me.I hope and for you.
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