Sometimes culture becomes the instrument of politics… In the heated debate that accompanied the days in Brussels, dominated by Wolfgang Schaeuble and Jeroen Dijsselbloem, strong references to Greek classics, reason and democracy, logos and polis, Aristotle and Pericles, were evoked several times… Alexis Tsipras even declared that morality surpasses law, citing Sophocles’ Antigone.
But perhaps the most pertinent association with the history of ancient Greece emerged concerning the draconian measures advocated by Germany.
Well, at that moment, we returned to the sixth and seventh century BC, right in Athens, where there was already a debate about debts and credits.
Draco, from which the known adjective derives, archon of Athens, enacted strict laws against debtors, generally poor farmers who were forced to guarantee their loans with the freedom of their daughters: in case of insolvency, the daughters were put up for sale at the slave market to repay the creditors.
It was Solon, poet and humanist, who succeeded Draco, who set things in the right direction. Thus, he abolished debt slavery and freed those who had fallen into servitude for that reason.
He reduced private and public debts through an operation that went down in history as “Seisachtheia,” or the lifting of burdens: the drachma was devalued by 30 percent (the weight was reduced from 6.27 to 4.36 grams in a way that made 100 drachmas equivalent to 73 old coins in silver).
We are in 594 BC and the (modern) devaluation is born!
Plutarch noted with the insight of a modern economist in Parallel Lives: “Both debtors and creditors were greatly benefited.”
Especially since Solon, remembered as one of the Seven Sages of Greece, made another important decision: the abolition of mortgage loans.
Solon, at the end of his days, was calm and satisfied. He said, looking at the gods: “And many Athenians, exiled by the oppression of debt, I brought back to their homeland.”
Solon’s monetary policy, trying to reconcile debtors and creditors, was compared by the Journal of Economic History to the governance of Athens to that of Franklin Roosevelt, and even John Maynard Keynes dedicated an essay to Solon.
Unfortunately, today’s Europe does not remember his teaching.
