Sublime

Prosperity is a restless thing; it drives itself to distraction.

Commercial profit was seen as legitimate only as compensation for the labor that merchants expended in transporting goods from one place to another, but never as fruits of speculation. What this meant in practice was that they were pro-market but anti-capitalist.

In the early empire, a greedy person was commonly referred to as being “the first to take the fresh-bought pepper from the camel’s back.”37 The poet Persius wrote: The greedy merchants led by lucre, run To the parched Indies, and the rising sun; From thence hot Pepper, and rich Drugs they bear, Bart’ring for Spices, their Italian ware.

“My toast is one of those maxims so dear to our hearts: ‘Business makes progress! Fortune passes everywhere!’ ”

It’s only once we can imagine human life as a series of commercial transactions that we’re capable of seeing our relation to the universe in terms of debt.

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Two decades later, Christopher Monroe cited Liverani’s work and suggested that the economy of the Late Bronze Age became unstable because of its increasing dependency on bronze and other prestige goods. Specifically, he saw “capitalist enterprise”—in which he included long-distance trade, and which dominated the palatial system present in the Late

While money itself was invented around 700 bce by the ancient Greeks, other ways of measuring wealth for the sake of easy exchange had been in use in Old World urban societies for millennia before then.