From wikipedia:
Contrary to popular conception, there is no evidence that societies relied only on barter before using money for trade.[73] Instead, non-monetary societies operated primarily along the principles of gift economics, and in more complex economies, on debt.[74][75][76] When barter occurred, it was usually between strangers or would-be enemies.[77]
If you want to learn a lot more about how economies worked in the past, I highly recommend the book “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” by David Graeber, author of “Bullshit Jobs.” It goes into this topic, and then presents a very detailed world history of economic systems from the perspective of an anthropologist.
Graeber’s work, as always, is truly incredible. Such a shame he died so young
His last book, “Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real LIbertalia” is pretty good if you haven’t read it, if you don’t mind a lot of Malagasy names.
That book radically changed my worldview, and then I read The Dawn Of Everything and it was changed again.
Thanks for the recommendation! I had a reminiscent Reddit reflex, where I looked the writer up to see if it wasn’t a ‘guns, germs and steel’ type of popular history, but was pleasantly surprised.
I have a bunch of reading to do now. Cheers!
And you forgot: slavery. Sparta basically enslaved surrounding hellenic population ( so called hellots ). Many Athenian politicians were quite disgusted with the harsh conditions Spartans enforced on hellots. Basically they maintained “population control” by slaining hellots en masse when their population grew too much ( Spartans were somewhere around of 10-15% of their dominion )
