And it’s not just Homer: tripods are a frequent subject of interest in the surviving Linear B tablets from Mycenaean Greece. These tripods were metal stands used to support braziers and the like. Anyone who has ever read the Homeric Iliad or Odyssey (mid-7th century BCE) will have noticed that when people give each other wealth, it’s often in the form of metal household utensils: namely, tripods. That delay ended up being built into the self-image of later Sparta, which was fixated on nostalgia for a distant past that was largely fictional.Īs to the use of iron, rather than silver: it was completely normal to use base metals to store value. The oddity of Sparta isn’t that they adopted iron currency: it’s that they held off on adopting coinage for a few centuries, until the 200s BCE. (The saying is a bit out of fashion now: maybe it’s better known via the parodic version in Terry Pratchett’s 1988 novel Sourcery, ‘as rich as Creosote’.)Īnyway, by the time coinage arrived in the Greek world, myths of Spartan exceptionalism were well on the way. Lydia doesn’t have a big public profile nowadays, but there are still two names from ancient Lydia that are pretty famous: king Midas, who really was a historical figure, even if we take it as read that the story about turning things to gold is fictional, and king Croesus, who was famous for being wealthy, and for losing his kingdom in the most ironic way possible, and who still survives in the proverbial saying ‘as rich as Croesus’. A few decades later, Greek states like Aegina and Athens started making their own coinage. That’s when coins were first developed in Lydia, a kingdom that dominated western Anatolia. Plutarch’s biggest mistake is that coinage wasn’t invented anywhere until the 6th century BCE, when Sparta’s military dominance was already at its height. But it wasn’t a novelty introduced by the legendary lawgiver Lycurgus, and in context, it makes complete sense. Pre-classical and classical Sparta may have used iron to store value.
And yet, there may be a kernel of truth in it. So you’d think there’s good reason to raise eyebrows at Plutarch’s story. Plutarch is one of the most unreliable sources we have for classical Sparta. Most of the stories of Spartan exceptionalism that are still popular today - about the Spartan agōgē, killing ‘defective’ babies, military supremacy, and so on - were shaped by centuries of myth-making, long after Sparta’s actual heyday. Now, Plutarch’s story is certainly distorted. For who was going to steal something, or take bribes in it, or steal it, or take it by force, when it wasn’t possible to conceal it, to possess it jealously, or even to make a profit by cutting it up? For the red-hot iron was quenched with vinegar, it’s said, so that the hardening took away its usefulness and value for any other purpose, making it weak and unworkable. When this was ratified, many kinds of crimes disappeared from Lacedaimon. The main piece of ancient testimony comes from Plutarch, a 2nd-century-CE essayist, biographer, and priest:įor first, voided all gold and silver coinage, and decreed that they should use only iron and to this he assigned only a small price for a large weight and volume, so that a value of ten mnai required a lot of storage in the home, and a pair of oxen to transport it. It’s just that there are some solid, sensible reasons why they might have done so. But it’s actually pretty plausible that the early and Classical-era Spartans really did use iron spits as a kind of money. When modern people hear it, they often think it’s a myth, because it sounds pretty daft. Welcome to 2018! Our first topic for this year may not actually be a myth. that’s because sowing is the helots’ job) In 2007, the company was honoured with an Echo award as Trade Partner of the Year.We do not sow! Game of Thrones, HBO, 2016 EMP distributes their articles in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Finland, Italy, France, Spain, Poland, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Sweden. EMP distributes music CDs and other merchandise, including shirts and buttons of rock and heavy metal bands. In 2007, over 240 people were employed by the company.
In September 2018, Warner Music Group acquired EMP from Sycamore Partners.įounded in 1986, by Frank Janetzky and Felix Lethmate, the company is based in Lower Saxony in Lingen, Germany, with affiliates all over Europe. In a 2003 report, the Osnabrück Chamber of Commerce considered the company to be the largest mail order business for hard rock and heavy metal music in Germany. The company distributes a quarterly catalog to customers. The "E.M.P." abbreviation stands for Exclusive Merchandise Products.
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