Chapter 8
Tyrant And Trapezitae
The expansion of mining, coinage, checking, banking and slavery into more tradition settings, would, from 750 B.C. to 250 B.C., from Homeric culture to Hellenistic civilization, change the very name of the slave from a word based on the house, to one based on the coin, with people, over the course of 500 years being reduced to a unit of exchange. The tyrants rose as an early indication of this trend. These were men of the traditional nobility who used alien financial baking, mercenaries & slaves to overthrow their own class, who had refused the “landless traders and manufacturers” membership in the ruling class.
In addition, the landed elites abused the peasants [small free holders] who “were oppressed by the rich and encouraged to get into debt and then were reduced to slavery and exile; slaves began to compete with free labour. Ambitious individuals capitalized on this discontent to overthrow the constituted government and establish themselves as tyrants in all the Greek cities with the notable exception of Sparta.” The later state used monetary abolition, dual kingship, and a council of elders, along with a myopic warrior ethic and xenophobia to avoid tyranny. [0]
Deep parallels between Planter England in the 1500s and 1600s, which permitted international agents of banking and shipping houses to enslave its poor—indeed employed these agents of misery to remove the hungry, homeless and needy—are drawn from pages 112 through 126 to focus almost exclusively on banking politics in Modern England, through 1920. This will be treated in the Plantation America omnibus In This New Isrаel: Volume 1: The Sowers.
To return to 600s B.C. Greece:
“If the land itself they did not own and control, it mattered not; for there were those voices that told them that land too was but a trade and a tool in the new order. As their factories and slaves were the capital investment that produced those textiles (as at Megara[1]), or pottery (as at Corinth), that every ship leaving the harbour carried to the ends of the earth, so the land of the great lord was but the capital investment that grew the food that he the manufacturer purchased for himself and his slaves or the raw materials needed for his particular trade; and he himself, in the money creator’s kingdom on earth, was as assessable in coin as was potter, weaver or armourer.’
The economy of the traditional home based manufacture of goods, by children, wives [2] and household slaves, was now taken to a house that was no home, where people slept before the tools and on or under the tables of their trade. This economy was directly replicated in early Modern Europe and America, with work houses at once prisons and factories. Ominously, the name of Megara—and there may be no foundational link—where textiles were manufactured, meant “Chambers.”
These chambers of purely muscle driven industry were staffed by the poor, “needless to say, soon returned to being poor again… The word “poor” having existed, of course, long before the crafty banker, standing in the shade beside the ways of life, arranged it that poverty and riches was in that number of (privately issued) units of exchange in which a man could be assessed according to success or failure in the conflict of life as he the banker had established it.”
The status of freeman or slave was, as in later ages that sowed America, established by the merchant class. The King of England in the 1700s would be unable to help Jemmy Annelsey from the clutches of his defrauders who sold him, in the return of what had been taken, and later advised a humbled gardener, Isrаel Potter, on avoiding the clutches of man hunters and soul driver, by hiding in London, for the KING could not protect his gardener from bounty hunters, jailers or creditors. The ancient petty king and tyrant as well, was in no position to disobey his financier.
This reader is reminded of Glaukus, Gray-fish of Karystos. He was a peasant’s son, scion of a free farmer. He would use the same hammer fist that he had once employed to straighten a plow blade, to win victory in boxing at Olympia. As an older man, he become a parasite, a side by side banquet friend with, of one Hiero, a Tyrant in Sicily. Glaukus was appointed as governor of a small city by this Tyrant. When revolution came to, Gela, I think was the name of this town, Glaukus was slain in an uprising. Just as tyrants and their “creatures” were elevated through the backing of financiers, the fomenting of uprisings, and the employ of paid professional soldiers, so were they disposed of.
When I advise fighters I train with to avoid political entanglements and work for money alone, I am thinking of being the paymaster’s man, not the man, of the paymaster’s puppet, a puppet, as they all are, which will eventually tatter on that duplicitous stage, to be cast into the rag heap of discarded social avatars.
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Intermission of Inquiry
Having adopted Astle’s view of lateral, anti-social, capitalist coordination as an ancient economic factor, I am compelled to set aside this fine, heavy, cloth book until my return to this writing retreat in May, 2025. I will now focus on the ancient writings of Hesiod, Arrian and Tacitus, as well as an academic review of the latest physical and linquistic evidence concerning the ancient Scythians, before returning to Astle’s starkly shadowed view of antiquity.
-JL, Baltimore City, 11/6/24
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Notes
-0. It is of interest to this reader that warrior ethics and fear or suspicion of alien immigration are among our strongest taboos in our postcultural monetary matrix.
-1. Megara and Corinth occupied the Isthmus, being trading cities on the east and west ends of the narrow strip of land that linked Redfaceisland with the rest of Greece.
-3. See Agamemnon’s statements as to the fate of captive women in the Iliad and, in the Odyssey, Penelope, a minor queen, weaving upon her loom.
