Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles - The Ludwig von Mises ...

42 Money, Bank Credit, and Economic CyclesB.C. 5 It is a forensic speech in which Isocrates defends theinterests of the son of a favorite of Satyrus, king of Bosphorus.The son accuses Passio, an Athenian banker, of misappropriatinga deposit of money entrusted to him. Passio was an exslaveof other bankers (Antisthenes and Archetratos), whosetrust he had obtained and whose success he even surpassed,for which he was awarded Athenian citizenship. Isocrates’sforensic speech describes an attempt by Passio to appropriatesame logic was behind terminology used in ancient Greece as well,where bankers were called trapezitei because they worked at a trapeza, ortable. This is why Isocrates’s speech “On a Matter of Banking” is traditionallyknown as Trapezitica. See Raymond de Roover, The Rise andDecline of the Medici Bank, 1397–1494 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 1963), p. 15. The great Diego de Covarrubias y Leyva, forhis part, indicates thatthe remuneration paid to money changers for the exchange ofmoney was called collybus by the Greeks, and thereforemoney changers were called collybists. They were also callednummularii and argentarii, as well as trapezitei, mensulariior bankers, because apart from changing money, they carriedout a much more profitable business activity: they receivedmoney for safekeeping and loaned at interest their ownmoney and that of others.See chapter 7 of Veterum collatio numismatum, published in Omnium operumin Salamanca in 1577.5 Isocrates was one of the ancient macróbioi, and he lived to be almost 100years old (436–338 B.C.). His life began during the last years of peacefulAthenian dominance over Persia and lasted through the PeloponnesianWar, Spartan and Theban supremacy and the Macedonian expansion,which ended in the battle of Chaeronea (Chaironeia), in which Philip IIdefeated the Delian League the same year Isocrates died. Isocrates’sfather, Theodorus, was a middle-class citizen whose flute factory hadearned him considerable wealth, permitting him to give his children anexcellent education. Isocrates’s direct teachers appear to have includedTheramines, Gorgias, and especally Socrates (there is a passage in Phaedruswhere Plato, using Socrates as a mouthpiece, praises the youngIsocrates, apparently ironically, predicting his great future). Isocrateswas a logographer; that is, he wrote legal speeches for others (peoplesuing or defending their rights) and later he opened a school of rhetoricin Athens. For information on Isocrates, see Juan Manuel Guzmán Hermida’s“Introducción General” to Discursos (Madrid: Biblioteca ClásicaGredos, 1979), vol. 1, pp. 7–43.