Hoarding in Greek comedies
In Olaria, Plautus, a rude guy buried a precious treasure under his fireplace. He entrusted hoarding to the family god related to the audience:
He begged me to keep the golden pot for him. When he died, he was so greedy that he never revealed his wealth to his son. He would rather make the boy poor than let him see coins. ... my son ignored me, and I let him die in vain and poor. His heirs used to be like his father and grandfather, but he has an only daughter who cares about me. Out of respect for her, I asked her father to find the treasure so that he would be more willing to provide her with a dowry.
In Plautus's other play, A Day's Wage, the character Tchami Des also buried his coins in his house. Plautus replayed Philemon's new comedy Treasure here. Other comedies of the same name were created by Greek playwrights Minand and Roman Lucius Ranu Vinouse. In his plays, Ranununus designed a clever literary technique to let hoarders leave notes hidden in treasures. Modern novelist Jack Winter did the same thing in his popular historical novel Stone in the Sky. This note will inform the new owner of the early situation of hoarding, such as the location of the first discovery and who is the next target.
Excerpts from books
Frank L Holt's When Money Speak.
When money speaks,
Frank Holt
For 2600 years, poets, economists, philosophers, historians and theologians have been thinking about the mystery of money. Who invented coins and why? Is the function of a coin beyond our control, as if it has its own ideas? How did it change world history and culture? Frank L Holt led us on a vivid journey of coin history, and coin research is one of the oldest and most important contributions to world history.
Learn more
Moral and legal considerations
You can also find hoarders and hoarders outside comedy. They are symbolic in the New Testament. In one example, a servant was punished for burying his master's money in the ground instead of investing it. Centuries ago, the Greek writer Xenophon commented on this unprofitable hoarding impulse: "When a person accumulates a lot of silver, he likes to bury the excess silver and use it."
The discovery of hoarding caused many legal disputes and moral dilemmas.
In another metaphor, Jesus seems to praise a man who found a treasure in the field, hid his discovery, and then sold all his property to buy it. Is this shrewd business or immoral behavior? For example, according to Roman law, anyone who finds a cache on his property has the right to keep it; If treasure is found on other people's land, it must be shared equally with the property owner. The man in Jesus' metaphor will deceive some masters by hiding his findings, but he obviously has the right to succeed.
Philostratus, a Greek writer, tells the story of a bankrupt businessman who prayed to Mother Earth, the guardian of the treasure, and led him to find the treasure-this is equivalent to winning the lottery in ancient times. A miracle worker offered help and negotiated with an evil owner to buy some land on his behalf. The businessman then found a huge treasure on his new property and became rich again, praising the saints who led him to buy it. The implication here seems to be that the middleman has been speculating about the existence of the vault, but it is ethical to cheat the seller, because the bankrupt businessman deserves more gold. Elsewhere, Philostratus described a lawsuit in which a man bought land and later found buried treasure while farming. The prosecution for selling land wants treasure, because he knows that this windfall will never sell land. The buyer in this case was acquitted. Obviously, hoarding discovery has caused many legal disputes and moral dilemmas.
criminal case
Some cases are blatant crimes. Cicero, the Roman orator, reported the murder and robbery around the vault:
Strato, a famous doctor, committed murder in order to hide a box full of coins and gold in his home. One night, he killed two sleeping slaves and hid their bodies in a fish pond. Then he cut the bottom of the box and took the coins and five pounds of gold.
A Greek-speaking person described the trial that was triggered by the murder and robbery of a money box filled with silverware and hundreds of Greek and Persian coins centuries ago. Egyptian papyrus keeps police records about the hoarding of stolen coins in Greek and Roman times. For example, in 28 AD, a villager named Orsenouphis submitted a report to the local police chief, complaining that a worker who was decorating a house found and stole an old cellar hidden on the wall. Orsenouphis claimed to know the contents of the stolen box, including the exact weight of each piece of jewelry and 60 silver drachmas, although the complainant's mother hid these treasures 42 years ago when he was only 8 years old. In another case 140 years ago, some Greek cavalry broke into the complainant's mother's room and snatched a jar containing 1 600 copper drachmas.
Hoarding in war
Treasure occupies a prominent position in the narrative of ancient wars. Plutarch recorded some cases involving famous generals, such as Alexander of Thebes and Pompeii of Carthage. Appian told a story about cassius in Rhode Island:
He ordered citizens with any money to bring them to him, declared those who tried to hide the money dead, and rewarded one tenth of the free informers or free slaves. At first, many Rodians expressed their fears, hoping that they would not be threatened in the end, but when they saw the rewards paid and were told about the people who were killed, they became afraid. Some of them dug money from the ground, some from the well, some from the grave, and then gave the money to cassius.
Athenaeus described how a group of Phoenicians were forced to give up their city after the siege and buried all their money in a secretly marked hiding place in case they could come back. According to Josephus, when 2000 Jewish refugees were searched for coins by greedy prisoners, the practice of smuggling them out of the besieged city by swallowing coins produced terrible results.
It is said that when Macedonian King Poerxiusi was defeated by Rome, he left a treasure map to his heir, which indicated the location of two treasures, one was hiding 900,000 drachmas, which were under a road in Hidden Princess Boli, and the other was hiding 420,000 drachmas, which were in Thessaloniki. Cassius Dior told us about another royal treasure house, which is said to have been hidden by the invading Romans around AD 100:
Decebalus' treasure was found hidden under the Sargetia River. Dirk Barros forced some prisoners to change the river flowing through his palace in order to bury the treasure in the river bed. Stones piled on the treasure, and the river returned to its original channel.
Divers can retrieve the treasure of Decebalus, a dangerous profession that can be traced back to the 5th century BC, when the Greek fisherman Scyllias and his daughter Hydna became famous. In addition to accidents, sometimes salvage divers are killed to keep silent after successfully rescuing treasures. In order to assist the potential salvage operation, some people have taken ingenious preventive measures. In 56 BC, Cato Yuty Kearns accumulated nearly 199 tons of looted silver, which he wanted to transport to Rome. In order to prevent accidents, he carefully divided the treasure into different boxes, tied a long rope to each box, and there was a huge cork at the end of the rope in order to find money when the ship sank.