Adam Tooze on "The Odyssey" and Economics of Ancient Greece | Ones and Tooze Ep. 253

Hi Cameron.

Yeah. Well, the source situation here isn't great. I'm by no means a classicist, and I have to admit that whenever I encountered the era of Greek mythology, I was profoundly confused. Because the crucial thing to realize, I think, is that the Homeric epics are from, we think, about 800 BC, which is 400 years before classical Greek Athens and so on. And they are about events which are 400 years before Homer. So they're about a period that we would roughly place at about 1,200 BC. So this is as though we were, in a complicated arcane poetic way, writing poetry in 2020 about stuff that happened under Charlemagne — or rather stuff that happened in the late medieval period — and we're trying to place ourselves in this. But the sweep of this narrative, where the source base gets relatively dense in the classical Greek period and the period that we're talking about is huge and massively mediated. The date commonly given for the sack of Troy is something like 1250. And what that does is to place this within the frame of what is now commonly referred to as the Bronze Age, which is a period in the Eastern Mediterranean of great imperial large-scale state structures. Egypt still there from much much earlier, the Hittites in central Turkey, the Greeks organized in Mycenaean state structures and states, the Babylonians, and many more. And the key commodity is bronze, which itself is an amalgam of copper and tin. And so the economics of the age, the sort of high-stakes economics, the great power economics of the age, are thought to have revolved essentially around the trade in those two commodities, of which copper was relatively abundantly available, whereas tin had to come from as far away as Afghanistan by ship. And that's what we think the economy of Troy was most likely based on, which was basically a kind of toll-taking on shipments of tin to the Mycenaean Greek states.

And there's a moment in the Nolan movie, I gather, which I haven't seen yet, in which Odysseus looking back realizes, 'Oh, are we the bad guys?' It's like, well, we the people that destroyed this structure because we were the dangerous men that came from the sea, and what we were really doing was struggling with Troy over control of trade. Oh, woe. And because woe is indeed the story of what comes next. Because the Troy story is complex: there is a Troy that was burned down in 1250, but unlike in the Homeric version where that marks the end of an entire era and everyone begins to trace their lineages from refugee Trojans around the rest of the world, that Troy actually we know was rebuilt quite quickly. So the one that fits best, the story of total annihilation, doesn't fit the narrative because it isn't obliterated with mystery — it's rebuilt. But what we do know is that from the early 1200s through to the mid-1100s BC, a total catastrophe hit the Eastern Mediterranean civilizations. It's known as the great crisis of the Bronze Age, out of which only Egypt survived. So all of the other state structures were massively disrupted. And so Homer's epic is looking back not just at the disaster of the war, but also at a civilization that is on the cusp — they know by 800 — of disintegration. And we think it's an effect of war-making, various types of dysfunctional economic structure, and of climate change that by the 1100s already had essentially destroyed all of the major civilizations of this era. So it's not for nothing in western civilization, in western culture, this epic — though the chronology is sort of telescoped so that essentially a period of 400 years, seen from 400 years later and then passed on to us 2,000 years later, is compressed into a single drama of the Trojan crisis — it's not for nothing that this really marks the foundational shock of western civilization and its epics and its telling of these stories. A foundational mark — if you're thinking about German culture, the Thirty Years' War and the great wars of the 20th century come to stand as further epics on this sort of scale. Nolan made Oppenheimer last, right? So he's moved from making films about atomic bombs to films about this moment. And there's a sort of logic in that.

Yeah. I mean, I think this is a really fascinating topic. The big drivers of the economy in the Bronze Age in this region were the palace economies. So those were the super-oikoi, the big large households that were driving long-distance trade. But the basic unit presumably of society was not the palace but large oikoi, so households, which were units of integrated economic management and material production in which you would have an owning family member, property, land which they owned, perhaps some craft implements, slaves, laborers, in a relatively self-sufficient term. And it's not by accident that the word for economic self-sufficiency, autarchy, is also Greek, because that's what describes one of the functions of an oikos — or rather one way of defining what an oikos is — is a unit of men, women, priests, enslaved, animals, tools, land that is self-sufficient. That's what makes an oikos. That is also its goal, and it achieves that through a second fundamental principle, which is division of labor. So this is already a social organism in that not everyone does the same thing — this system is organized into a series of appropriate tasks. Men typically managing agriculture, women doing indoor tasks, certain work for free people, certain work for slaves. And then also it is a model of management, and patriarchal management. And that, after all, is the central question on the domestic side of the Odyssey story: who's going to end up marrying the widow, the supposed widow, because they then enter into control of this oikos. And this adds a second element to the Greek notion of economy, which is oikos on the one hand, and either nomos — I've seen it derived from — or nemein. So nomos is order and nemein means management. So in the idea of oikonomikos, which we get from Xenophon in the Socratic dialogue, you have oikos management as being a new type of knowledge. And it's something that young future masters have to learn. It is something that women have to be taught by their husbands. It is something that has to be imposed as a form of order. So it's an inherently hierarchical, inherently patriarchal, based on a radical division between free and unfree, between directing and non-directing.

And it is indeed, I think, if you were to mirror it in the modern world, something like — well, in the Christian world, monasteries would fit within this model. And then ultimately you might think the corporation as similarly a zone of hierarchy and order within what in our period has become something much wider, which is a public economy. And the steps to that are really complicated and tested also within the classical literature. The version that you and I will have learned in political theory courses is that in classical Greece, oikos and polis — so the world of private economic reproduction which was held within the household and sufficient unto itself — was prior to but also inferior ultimately in its logic to political action in the realm of the public sphere, the polis, where people attained not the endless drudgery of reproduction but something like history. In other words, you could write yourself into immortality through actions in the public space. And Hannah Arendt, amongst modern political theorists, will draw this line most starkly. And she does it in part, I think, to distance herself and place distance between herself and what she sees as one of the degeneracies of the modern era, of the modern condition, which is that since the 18th century progressively the oikos has actually become the public realm. So as the household of the ruler opens up, as civil society, a public sphere, the economy begins to be theorized in the 18th and 19th century as a zone of general exchange and indeed of significant both public and state interest. This new zone of the economy, and then a zone of what will really irk Arendt — the zone of the social — emerges, which is really the public version of the interior of the oikos, as the central concern of modern life. Now, modern scholars — notably anyone with a left-wing disposition or a feminist — will take issue with Arendt on that score. Apparently classical scholars also take issue with this because they actually believe that this version of the sharp distinction between the private and the public that Arendt derives from Aristotle is overdrawn, and that the actual logic of Greek polis state society functioning was, as you'd imagine, far more integrated than that. If you think about my great friend Stefan Eich writing about Aristotle on money, you can already see the way in which in the realm of exchange and chrematistics you see intermediary links, because when households have to trade with each other, what do they trade in? They trade in money, and money is eminently a political function because it's almost like a language that ties the polis together. So nevertheless, that's the kind of genealogy we're talking about here. And in European political thought, from the early modern period onwards, as the Renaissance hits and people go deep into the Greeks and start kind of working this through, the modern vision of the economy is self-consciously developed against readings of this classical history.

This is a fascinating question, because risk is also so closely associated with questions of underlying metaphysics — what do we think about how the world is organized? And again, I'm no classicist, but I was reading — there's a source, a farmer named Hesiod, who in the 8th century BC, so a little after Homer I guess, writes this text called Works and Days, in which he describes to his lazy brother how the world works. And his underlying theory of the riskiness of the world is tied to a historical narrative. So he thinks there was a golden generation that was created by Zeus directly, who lived like gods and were in harmony with the gods, and all was good for them. And then came the second generation, the silver generation, who were arrogant and proud and began to get ahead of themselves. And then there was a bronze generation — you can see he uses iron types to describe this — who were violent and self-destructive. And then came the fourth age, the age of heroes, the age of heroes described by Homer, who went to their graves at Troy. And Greeks now, he's saying to his brother, from 700 BC onwards, live in an iron generation, which is marked by a weather system of good and bad fortune in which pain and joy alternate in ways which you have to prudently learn to manage. So he has a meta-theory of why there is risk: we're at risk because we live in an age of iron. We got there through our own psychodramas with the gods. And in that world, to live free of worries is essentially impossible. You can't, right? You're going to live in a world in which things don't last. Summer won't last forever. So what have you got to do? You've got to build granaries. There's neither a stop to toil and sorrow by day nor to death by night. You have to adjust to this tough iron reality. He lectures his brother. So what can you do? Well, what you've really got to do is figure out what the gods will — what Zeus wants — because that's your only hope of navigating this space.

And so, according to Hesiod, this Hesiodian kind of view puts a huge premium on divination. What you've really got to be able to do is figure out what these forces are aiming to do. And so every kind of divination — most famously of course the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi, which I've had the privilege of visiting, may have done a show from there. I mean, it's the sort of place that could make you think you could see the spirit of God acting here. But then if you can't afford a trip to Delphi and you can't afford to pay for an oracle, you throw dice. The Greeks were in the western tradition the great originator of games of luck, but not just games of luck, but modes of divination. And they would look for any kind of omen. So there is a figure — a professional Greek — which is chrēsmologos, whose job it is to read oracles. And this is a big business. It's kind of like what we do — it's like talking heads of the Greek polis who would give opinions about things like whether the Spartan invasion of 431 is going to go well for the Greeks or the Spartans, or whether it's really a good idea to send a huge expedition to Sicily in 415. And apparently local potentates would buy off the weather forecasters to get them to make the right signs. And of course the Sicilian expedition was absolutely catastrophic. But the other way of mitigating risk — you're absolutely right, it's a crude functional reading, but it's nevertheless clearly true — is that you make offerings and you try and establish a relationship with the gods which is benign. You signify your subordination, you try and read their minds, because you've got this theory that we're in this age of iron where through our own failure to basically live in harmony with the gods and through the disaster of Troy where the true heroes died, we're now in this space of what we would call radical uncertainty. We have to cope with this.

Well, this is calculable — but that's facile, right? Because how do you know whether it's calculable or not? What are the conditions under which it's calculable? When they get the dice out and roll the dice, they're saying it's calculable and these dice will tell you. You know, it's like — real garb, that's very unscientific. And then I'll say to you, well, you show me the science on AI forecasting. So—

They have their — they construct calculability. What we can see them doing is definitely trying to reduce it to risk, even though Hesiod is telling them this might not be that kind of problem.

Well, it really leads there, right? What do you do actuarial tables for? But essentially to map the dice game of life. That's what they're for. They're literally designed for cities like Manchester where you're going — can I take out insurance on a middle-class guy in Manchester? What's his death rate compared to if he was living in the countryside? Is this a good proposition? Manchester was — we talked about this in the last show — an incubator of social science precisely because they were trying to calculate the risks of surviving in this new iron age.