>> Dean Lanham:
Good Afternoon. 

I am Allen Lanham, and I am Dean of Library Services and it is a pleasure to welcome you to the continuation of our series on Ancient Greece.  

Today we have several speakers who will be speaking here today.  

One, two, and three and then in the Booth Library Atrium, this evening at 7:00PM, I mention this specifically, because some of the advertising has been incorrect in the Daily Eastern News, it is at 7:00PM in the Atrium and it is a group of five theatre students who are presenting selections from Greek plays, and we have set up a scenario in the Atrium for them to perform tonight, so we hope [unclear dialogue] those.  

For those of you who have not been to previous sections, or sessions of this symposium, I direct your attention to the booklet, because there are several other opportunities that are coming up.  

Tomorrow there is a film, and next week we have a full round of activities, and lectures planned, so we hope that you will join us.  

Today is especially interesting to me, because we have three very distinguished members from the College of Business faculty who I am so wanting to hear some background related to our topic here. 

But to start that presentation, I will ask Dr. Wahby, who is the coordinator of this symposium to announce our speakers. 

>> Dr. Wahby:
Thank you very much.  

Welcome to the business session of the Ancient Greece Symposium, A Futuristic Look Through Ancient Lenses.  

Last year we, this year we went to Egypt, ancient Egypt, now we are ancient Greece.  

And I want to make sure before we start the presentation, that you can respond well.  

It is interactive session, so I want you to finish in a minute; I want you to say "Deal". 

>> Crowd:
Deal

>> Dr. Wahby:
All together. 

>> Crowd:
Deal

>> Dr. Wahby:
Big One!

>> Crowd:
DEAL!

>> Dr. Wahby:
Very good.  

So, went I point at you, say, "Deal". 

Now, I'll have the coat of a businessman, and I tell you, or salesperson, at three stars. Buy one, get three.  

Three.  

Three stars from the world of business.  

Buy one, for free, get two for free.  

Deal?

>> Crowd:
Deal

>>  Dr. Wahby:
Very good, and without much adieu, I ask our Dean Izadi to introduce them; he was my chair before in the School of Technology. 

So it is my Chair and my Dean.  

>> Dr. Izadi:
Thanks Dr. Wahby.  

I would like to welcome you to this session of the Greek Symposium. 

I want to thank Dr. Wahby and Dr. Dean Lanham for organizing this program.  

This year we have participation and support from all four colleges at this University, and I would like to indicate that the Lumpkin College of Business and Applied Sciences is fully supporting this program, not only by financial, spiritual, but also, several members of the faculty in the Lumpkin College of Business and Applied Sciences are participating as presenters.  

Talking about presenters, today we have three distinguished faculty members and administrators from the school of Business, Dr. David Bogg, Dr. Bill Wooton, and Dr. Cheryl Noll, from Management Accounting and Dr. Noll is the Chair of the School of Business, are here with us to talk to us about the Business and Accounting Practices in Ancient Greece. 

I am really looking forward to this one.  

I hope that you enjoy this and have a great day.  

Thank you very much. 

>> Dr. Noll:
What am I supposed to do?  

I am taking my instructions from that guy back there.
 
First of all, I want to thank all of you for coming, and I have to start this with, I've heard this distinguished professor so many times, I am not quite sure, but I hope we live up to that.  

We agreed to do this because as academics, we are always looking to learn something new, always seeking new understanding, and new knowledge.  

We went into this knowing not much at all about Ancient Greece, and business in Ancient Greece.  

And I will speak for all of us that we have found this to be a very interesting, and fun process, and so we are going to be sharing with you what we have learned.  

We open this up to you for our questions during the presentation if you wish, comments, so that we can turn this into a learning dialogue for all of us.  

First of all, Dr. David Boggs is going to be our first presenter. 

He is going to talk about Greek people, places, times, and dynamics of the society, International trade, and classical Greece.  

I am going to be talking about the labor force, and buying and selling in local markets. 

Dr. Bill Wooten is going to be talking about record keeping systems, and lending practices in Ancient Greece.  

And at this point, I will turn it over to Dr. Boggs. 

>> Dr. Boggs:
Thank you so much.  

Thank you.  

Well, this was something new to me that I learned.  

Business which we teach regularly in it modern guise, first appeared in the small weak and poor city states of ancient Greece, and I was looking to examine international trade, and that means trade between nations, or inter-nation, and so that caused me to say well what was a nation, and I went in thinking a nation of Greece as we have it today, and then learned that in fact, there, this is a long time period when we speak of ancient Greece, so I needed to get my times right, and then also get the borders right.  

In terms of ancient Greece, we have these periods listed, and our focus is going to be on the classical period, which the dates vary from 600 to 400 or 500 to 323.  

Mostly we focus on the time period from the defeat of the Persians in 480 and 490 to the death of Alexander.  

So this is the timing, now the peoples I mentioned.  

The Helene’s or the Greeks I thought of as a single people, but in fact, these during the time period we are looking at you have the city-states that were aligning with each other at the times, warring with each other and so if we talk about international trade, or trade between or across borders, it's sort of challenging to look back over this period of time and actually define the borders, because the borders were constantly shifting.  

The Greek people are actually different groups of people so the Spartans are generally considered Dorians, whereas the Athenians, which have been more of our focus, were the Ionians, but the Ionians were spread throughout the Aegean Sea. 

They emigrated with an E, that is, to the coastal areas is all around.  

There are the regions that we might think of them as counties, or regions that are listed there. 

Athens was in Attica, for example, Delos and Naxos are some of the Islands, so we have the, and then we have the Pelopenisis, and you have the city-states, the most notable ones being Sparta, and Athens, and but lots of others, and important ones are listed there.  

And these city-states, they really acted pretty independently, and thus inter-nation was in many regards, inter-city trade, or inter-region trade.  

And these cities at times went to war with each other, and as well as joined together against the Persians, particularly, and so you had this continually shifting leagues of alliances of city-states.  

But, a notable and important date for us, is, we mentioned the classical period, you have the defeat of the Persians in 480 at Salamis in particular is of note, because after that time period, the Persians didn't really have the influence that they previously had in the Aegean sea.  

So, here is a map of what we are talking about, so I mentioned the Islands Delos and Naxos but you have just hundreds or thousands of Islands in this area, I mentioned the Ionians, and right here you have Ionia which is actually in Asia Minor, but you had Greeks the Athenians, and Ionians here that settled in this region, and then they would pass back and forth between over the years, between control, local control, control by the Persians, control by the Greeks. 

And then of course we have Sparta down here.  

This is a Trireme and the Greek Trireme is what provided the Greeks with the power to conduct trade over the Aegean Sea. 

And at the time period of if we go to 500 BC that we are looking at, the Persians were very, very much the dominant power.  

And they moved in towards Athens.  

They actually in 480 took Athens. 

The Athenians fled their city they had built 200 of these triremes. 

And the trireme is because the Tri is for the three rows of oars, and these were human powered oars, and these ships also had a ram in the front, and so the Greeks fled, and with some measure of trickery or deceit or how you can choose the language which you'd like to apply there, they persuaded the Persians to come out on their vessels, their boats, their ships, to fight against the Athenians, who they were under the impression and were lead to believe they were fleeing.  

When in fact, the Athenians were luring them in and the Athenians conquered and destroyed the Persian Navy in 480. 

And then after that time, the Athenians, with these ships, were the dominant power of the seas.  

And again we back up and the Aegean in particular, but even beyond the Aegean, and in the Mediterranean, the Athenians were the sea-power.  

And if we look at that today you can think well today, having military power still is influential for trade.  

And the United States is a strong military power and there is no ability of other nations, particularly to restrict the movement of American ships. 

Merchant ships because of the power of the Military fleet. 

And to a certain extent that would be true of the this time period as well, where the Athenian ships were the dominant power in the Aegean and that permitted trade from merchant ships to take place. 

So this is the military or naval ship and here is a merchant ship.  

And one of the books that I looked at was by Keith Roberts, a recent publication on the history of money in the ancient world.  

And you'll see that Roberts notes that these specialized ships came into being. 

These are ships for trade, and these were of course the specialized ships for warfare.  

So, who did the Greeks trade with?  

Well, for one they traded with themselves, other Greek peoples and settlements, and this would include the settlements along the Aegean but also the Greeks settled in Southern Italy. 

They also traded with the Persian and the Assyrians, the Phoenicians, and Phoenicia would be present day Lebanon, Egyptians, as well as North Africa. 

Here is a picture of the trade routes that were in place during this time, and really the wealth was some authors would say the greatest wealth and influence was in the Eastern Mediterranean and I read one argument that said, Alexander the Great went eastward to Persia because that was considered the center of wealth and power.  

But if we look at the trade routes, this includes Greek and Phoenician trade routes, the Phoenicians settled a little more on the southern coast of Africa and one thing that may stand out to you is they like to stay close to shore. 

That allowed them to enter harbors, especially if there was problems with the weather, etc. 

Now what did they trade?  

That was certainly of interest to me, and I've provided a list here of a number of the goods that they traded.  

One, I think something that stands out to me, is there is not a lot of iPods and computers, and technology things that we trade, but a lot of these products, we would call them commodities today.  

They don't have differentiated, though some of them are differentiated like the art and decorative items.  

Some of these were used for building, building ships or military vessels, food was extremely important, and food went two ways.  

It was the major import, and a major export for the Athenians.  

The export was the olives, olive oil, wine, and their land was suited to that.  

Whereas, the imports, grain was a very important import.  

Here, you can see some pictures of how the goods were shipped.  

You have decorated vessels, but these vessels here, which have been recovered from the sea, wreckage, demonstrates how goods would have been shipped.  

And this is actually shaped as the side of the ship, and these would have a pointy bottom and actually slot right in.  

They could then be tied up, and both liquid and dry goods may have been shipped in these, but certainly wines, and oils, etc.  

So what were the concerns for shipping?  

Some of these seem pretty relevant to today, if we look at Somalia for example.  

Piracy was a concern during this time.  

Weather was very much a concern, and thus, you see those trade routes again along the coast.  

Trade barriers were not actually an enormous concern; there were not a lot of tariffs, and taxes on trade.  

What normally would happen is when a ship entered a city, there might have been a two percent docking fee on their goods that they transacted, and so it is really not a particularly high number on tariffs, or other charges.  

The trade, as you can see, it was considered private, voluntary, and competitive.  

But I want to pretty much finish with two quick stories that illustrate the influence of trade in this time period.  

One, I'll actually go backwards. 

I'll start with the scuttled ship.  

This was pretty interesting to me reading about a merchant ship at this time there was available insurance for vessels and if a vessel was lot at sea, it was considered, ok, you don't have to pay back the money. 

And so one story that is told from one of the books that I read was, merchant vessel where the ship's captains actually took out insurance several times over on the ship, and they used the grain of the ship as the guarantee for the money, which they borrowed.  

Then they went out and started drilling through the bottom of the ship, to sink the ship, so that they could keep the money, and not have to, the money that they'd collected from several different people.  

However, they failed in trying to sink the ship.  

The ship was brought in to harbor at it's destination, and you had three different groups all saying, staking a claim, saying that's my grain on the ship, no that's my grain on the ship.  

So it shows some level of development of the financial systems that I think is pretty interesting.  

The second, and this is a very interesting story. 

And it relates to the imports and the exports.  

I mentioned Athens was the sea power, and in approximately 430 Athens went to war with Sparta.  

And the Spartans were a fighting people and the Athenians did not want to meet them on land, and so their strategy was, we will build walls around our city, we'll hide in our city, this is Athens right here, and this is the sea, and so we'll build walls, actually there's a North wall and a South wall here, that lead down to Piraeus, and here's the sea, and we'll send our ships out to fight the Spartans.  

So it'll be a Naval battle, and not a land-based battle.  

And Naval is where the Athenians were powerful.  

Well, in order to do this, they had to have food, because the Spartans came and burned all the fields around, and this is a war that went on for many, many, many years. 

And so for years, what you have are the Athenians basically feeding themselves, the entire city, which most would say the city was one to two hundred thousand people, feeding themselves by importing grain from these surrounding areas around the Aegean.  

So they were able to live years that way, where we just bring in the food.  

What led to their downfall is they ended up with all those people closed in, and bringing food in on ships they ended up getting the plague, and a third of the people died, and ultimately the Spartans were victorious and overran Athens.  

But, those are two little stories that illustrate the trading activities that were taking place in the time period that we have looked at.  

I'll finished with just a quick statement that trade and business was not necessarily considered the most elite form of activity during Greek times. 

It was also very dangerous and there are some quotes here I won't read them all, but they are listed there and I'll turn our attention now from international trade to business activities of a domestic nature to Dr. Noll.

>> Dr. Noll:
Thank you.  

Thanks.  

I first want to address a little bit about the labor force.  

Who were the people who actually worked?  

Dr. Boggs indicated that being in business and being an entrepreneur was not a profession that people looked at with a lot of respect.  

These people many times were considered to be dealers, you know, making a lot of decisions in ways that were not transparent and open, and they weren't the upper elite part of society.  

And you wonder who did all the work then. 

Essentially, the center of the business unit was the family.  

You would have a father, a mother, the children, and in-laws and slaves who would live together in one household.  

And the children worked, the men typically did the physical labor.  

Many times they would do the farming, and many times the slaves would do the craftwork and some farming work, but it was very labor intensive.  

The people who were not in business as a profession were considered the philosophers and the thinkers and actors and people who would come to the Agora that I'll get to in a minute, to talk and to pontificate and to share ideas.  

Those were the people who were considered to be the elite of society.  

The family unit many times would have the slaves live in the household with them, that was uncommon to have many slaves and servants who would take care of family daily needs.  

Women, surprisingly enough, played, or could play, not always, but many times played a very important role in business.  

Oftentimes, not the wives, but in their role as a sister to a brother who was in business, they would carry on much of the operations of a business including the financial part of the business.  

So, they did trade, they traded livestock, they would trade products, they would sell their products, at marketplace, so it was the women many times who carried on the daily operations of business, selling, buying, trading.  

Each household typically would take care of their own needs.  

It wasn't until the classical period of ancient Greece that people started to generate wealth by selling their products, but selling their goods, by selling services, because they would generate and create more than what they actually needed.  

But it wasn't until that time period that that started to take place.  

Oops, sorry, I want to go back to one thing, the medics.  

That group of people was considered foreign nationals and so these were people who were not necessarily from Greece, but they would come to Greece and the states of Greece, and work.  

And they were part of the labor force, but they were not allowed to own land, or property of any kind.  

So that was the distinction between the people who were actually born in Greece, and people who came to Greece to live.  

They were not permitted to own land or property of any kind, but they were allowed to work and then therefore contribute to the growth of the economy.  

The Agora that I mentioned a minute ago.  

Everybody has probably heard of the Agora.  

It was the marketplace of Ancient Greece.  

When it started, it was really was a place where the military would get their orders.  

And Dr. Boggs talked about the military and their strength of the military, but that is where they would get their quote, unquote, marching orders, at the Agora. 

It eventually transitioned into a market place, where people would actually create their products, their textiles, their pottery, and sell them right then and there at the marketplace.  

So they were created there and sold there at that place.  

It was also a location where people would come, to talk, to converse, and to share ideas to recite poetry, to act, and as a result, because it was a public place for interaction, to verbalize to discuss, to talk and to sell products, it was the public forum, much like our square in Charleston used to be in the Midwest, the Square of a township was that place for public gathering and for selling your products.  

The same kind of environment was the Agora.  

And henceforth, our word that we use today, Agoraphobia, describes fear of being outside, public places, so that word that we use today, so easily, agoraphobia, comes from the Greek word Agora as a fear of being in a public place.  

At the market.  

These were the kinds of things they sold at the market.  

Dr. Boggs talked about international trade, but what was sold at the marketplace, many times were things that were traded internationally and ended up at the marketplace.  

Some of the products were created right there.  

Olives, grapes, pottery, and Dr. Boggs showed two different kinds of pottery, the kind that was used for serve for vessels to store, and also for aesthetic purposes.  

And this is, this bottom image is depicting textile weaving.  

Mostly done by women, but in the marketplace, they would generate their textiles, their garments, and sell them right there.  

What did people do for a living?  

The professions categorized as physicians, sculptors, Boatwright’s, teachers, tutors, actors, athletes; those seem to be from the readings, the more respected professions.  

The ones on the right hand side are very labor-intensive kinds of jobs.  

But those were the kinds of things the people did.  

Blacksmith, merchant, banker, farmer, and landowner, and they are in those two distinct categories. 

And I will turn it over to Dr. Wootton, who is going to talk about record keeping and accounting. 

[00:29:08;14]

>> Dr. Wootton:
The last two weeks, I've been reading a lot about accounting, I do historically certain accounting area, so I thought well I'd give you a background of it.  

And then I started reading about the ancient Greeks, and I thought I really know nothing.  

So, that's where I am starting from. 

 And the other thing, I was thinking was is unique about accounting in Greece from maybe Italy, or China, or Japan?  

The major difference is in Greece there were no [unclear dialogue] government officials, but today we often think about well, I don't have the trust in the government.  

But you take ours, and make it ten times larger; they had no trust in public officials.  

So, why did accounting develop? 

And it is all based on the idea of trust.  

Getting started about 3200 BC, and we really had an accounting system 5,000 years ago.  

We had internal probes.

We had the need for auditors, we had accountants, but in most countries, you did not have actually have accounting systems develop until a certain event occurred.  

In the United States after [unclear dialogue} wrote his classic book called "The Invisible Hat" and he says, "why did accounting develop in the US?"  

Well, we started 500 years ago, but there was no accounting until about 1850 in the United States, and that was with the creation of the westward movement.  

All at once, with the development of the railroad, you had to have an accounting system.  

That was the case in Greece.  

There was no need for accounting for most of the history, because you had dictators, you had rulers, and they made the decisions.  

We are going to spend the money for this, we are going to put it here, you had no say over it, how the money is going to be spent. 

So, there was no need to keep track of the records, because it was all controlled by one person.  

Then we had the development of what we called the ancient Greek, the development, I am sorry, the democratic development of the ancient Greece, and all at once, there was this need.  

Now there is a modern historian who talks about it, there's an ancient Greek historian who talks about this and he was saying, "Thus by the time of the emergence of the Greek city state the row and the need for accountant and auditor had been established. 

So, with the emergent of the more democratic state, I always say more democratic, because remember half the population was white.  

It wasn't democratic, if you just simply say half of you can do nothing, but to the other half it was a very democratic state, and they were very proud of that.  

But and all at once, the expenditures were being controlled by government officials.  

They were the ones who received the money, the ones who disbursed the money. 

So, there had to be this need to keep track of where the money was coming from, and where the money was going.  

And they relied upon the accountant for that.  

They said somebody has to keep track, 

So if you look back at this period of time, and we think about transparency, they were ten times more transparent than we were.  

Because every year, every government official had to give a report to the general assembly.  

Well, this consisted of five hundred Greek citizens called the national assembly, but every citizen could come, and they did come, 

For one of these reports, you might have six to eight thousand people in the audience looking to this person saying here's what I did with your money the past year.  

Now, think about that in Illinois.  

That's five percent of the population came.  

In Illinois we have 600,000 people in a field listening to this official saying, "Here is what I did".  

There is another unique thing about it, is that each official normally had a time of office of only one year.  

At the end of the one year, you also were audited.  

At the end of the year, you provided all the records that you had, and you gave it to the auditors and they reviewed it.  

So, there was this constant distrust of the officials.  

Contractors, what did they have to do?  

Well, if you were building a building for the Greek government, for the Greece in Athens, one of the stones would have the expenditures that you made on that building.  

On that stone you would have the receipts, how much did I receive, where did it go?  

And it might be well, we paid the quarrymen, or we paid for the stones, or we had transportation costs, or we had the people who sculptured the release, so again, this was part of the requirement.  

And again, repeating, it is that they required each person to give a report annually, if you were a government official, and what was the punishment?  

The punishment was very severe if you are convicted of rock bribery you had to pay ten times the amount of rock.  

If you mismanaged, not stole, simply mismanaged funds, you had to repay that twice.  

So mismanagement was a very severe thing.  

And those were kind of like civil penalties.  

And then we had criminal penalties.  

Death could be given for embezzlement.  

There was a classic case in Greece.  

And now we are talking about in Athens, and in Athens, ten is the magic number.  

Normally, the auditors were in groups of ten, the treasurers were in ten, again, the division of duty.  

If we've got ten people responsible, we've got ten eyes, or twenty eyes, instead of ten eyes looking at that.  

So, ten treasurers were convicted of embezzlement.  

And what was their sentence?  

Death. 

So each day one treasurer was executed. 

On the tenth day, they discovered there had been no embezzlement.  

They had simply made a mistake in recording it.  

It was an accounting error.  

The tenth person was set free.  

But in this case, you are saying basically if you steal from them it is death.  

So, there was this very high level of distrust.  

Now, as I said a few moments ago, at the end of a term you had to give all of your records to the auditors.  

Now in Greece, there were three levels of auditing.  

You had the council accountants.  

The council accountants are the equivalent of the audit committee in a corporation.  

They set the general guidelines. 

They determined what would be the internal probe; they set guidelines for the disbursements, and the receipts.  

And the receipts in Greece again were quite unique.  

They were kind of like we would say in accounting, appropriate for certain things.  

So tribute had to be spent on the military.  

The revenues from the silver mine had to be spent on shipbuilding and on the public welfare.  

So that was the responsibility of the council accountant, to set these general guidelines, where were the revenues to come from, where were they dedicated to?  

The second were called the administration accountants.  

Now the administrations accounts responsibilities were to audit the official who left.  

Once leaving office, you had 30 days to provide all records to the auditor.  

The auditors had 30 days to review the record.  

What the auditors normally would do is to go back to the council accountant and look at the internal probe. 

If the internal probe were good, they would simply give less time to this audit.  

If it was weak, they would spend more time.  

At the end of the 30 days, then they would say this person has met the requirements of the office, they are fine.  

Or they could say, "no, there's a fraud here", and then it could go to court. 

Then there's one other thing.  

Even if you were cleared by the council accountant, any citizen could bring a charge against any officer in Athens, so maybe thirty days or sixty days later, somebody says, this person was guilty of fraud while in office.  

In this case, we have the third level and this is the board of examiners.  

The board of the examiners they would go back and read and examine all the records and try to find whether or not embezzlement or mismanagement had occurred. 

If they found it, then they would report it to the court for prosecution.  

So, again, there was a series of checks and balances.  

Again, much more than we would have in the city of Charleston, or the state of Illinois.  

When you leave office here, there's not a mandatory audit of everything you've done during that term of office.  

No single citizen can walk in up at Springfield and say that person has embezzled, I want him to be audited.  

But, if that was the case in Greece.  

>> Audience member:
Too bad. 

>> Dr. Wootton:
Yeah.

They felt like we are responsible for the government officials and the government officials are responsible unto us.  

One other thing I have given you two very short handouts there you might want to look at.  

One is how to read a balance sheet.  

It is a very simple balance sheet.  

And this would be for the city itself of Athens.  

And basically everything was in the temple of the [unclear dialogue] 

Every dollar that came in, all the receipts would come to the temple, and the disbursements would come out.  

Everything had to be recorded on the books of the treasurer by [unclear dialogue]"treasurer of Athenia" so they basically had three types of assets.  

They had cash, or cash equivalent, they had [unclear dialogue] occasionally the state would make a loan to another state, or to the government itself, and third we had the physical assets.  

We had booty, we had a war, the treasurer [unclear dialogue] when the person had to pay the penalty, that is in there, and we had the gold and the silver on the, I guess you could say, the pottery and things of this nature. 

 On the liability side, on the right side we had dedicated funds.  

This is the equivalent of what we would call today appropriated retained earnings.  

These are the future expenditures that we have already agreed to make, and then you had your capital reserve, which is the equivalent of our capital account today.  

So, very simple balance sheet.  

On the second thing is the budget. 

The Greeks at this time, were very protempora about a budget.  

We had to have a budget every year.  

You had a general budget and you had specific budgets and this is the budget for one year, I think it is 434 B.C. for the Parthenon.  

It said what are we going to spend this year on construction?  

This is literally the construction of this gigantic building and they are saying there is going to be three sources.  

One, we are going to take the money from the treasury, this is the cash, two, we are going to sell [unclear dialogue] and three we are going to sell ivory.  

Now I never thought about ivory being such a large revenue source, but if you look at it, that's one of the major sources of funds and on the other side, it said, where is the money going to go?  

Contractor saying there's going to be a little bit left over, and it seems like they usually met the budget.  

That it would come in under cost. 

If so, it went to this reserve account that you would use for emergencies.  

Now I'd like to talk about one final thing here, and that is the slaves and there is two great hinges I think in relation to that.  

One, is this first name I never get this name right but I am going to say Pashion. Pashion was a slave and he was hired, I guess I shouldn't say hired, he was bought by two bankers and they brought him into the bank as they [unclear dialogue] 

Now over the years, he grows up within the bank, and he became the chief clerk for the money changing operations.  

And this is the most important part of most banks at that time.  

Nearly all the banks began as moneychangers.  

And he reached the select.  

Well, they gave him his freedom, he had done very well, was very successful, so they gave him his freedom.  

He remained in the bank, then the two bankers died, as a precursor he took over the bank, and continued to make it even more successful.  

Then, he gave some gifts to the state, gifts to prominent people, and he was finally given Athenian citizenship.  

Now, only the citizens of Athens could buy property so all at once, he started buying property.  

And he became even more wealthy, and at his death, he was the wealthiest person probably in Athens, the largest property owner.  

Who succeeded him at the bank?  

Another slave who basically did the same thing.  

Now one other unique thing, women do not inherit so, when he died, his wife married, the slave could inherit, so the wealth was transferred basically to her, but it was coming this indirect way.  

The other thing is, if you looked at Athens as a whole, one of the accountants were slaves. 

The paymaster very possibly was a slave, the executive clerk was a slave, they disbursement clerk was a slave, maybe the accountant [unclear dialogue] was a slave.  

Now why did we want slaves to be accountants?  

And there was one basic reason.  

In Athens, you could not torture a public citizen, you could not torture a former resident, but you could torture a slave.  

And again this idea of trust.  

The Athens citizens of that day, the only way that you could get a person to tell the truth was through torture.  

If you could torture a person enough, they would end up telling the truth.  

So if you had a slave as an accountant, you could torture this person until you got the truth.  

The citizen you could not.  

So I mean it is a very dreadful thing to say well that is the trade we brought in to the accountant, the ability to be tortured but that basically was the case then.  

That in many cases, you wanted someone you could torture.  

So just simply concluding here, I think in Greece, we see the fourth, I guess third, of today, this idea of transparency they wanted a very transparent society, the concept of internal control, they had internal control rather than I think most corporations, and idea of trust, do we have trust or not.  

Thank you.

>> Dr. Noll:
In conclusion, because we are looking at the past and how that has impacted the way we live today, the impact on modern business.  

This time period was the time period where the creation of material wealth just to have material things and wealth, it was the first time where the market created the demand for a product.  

That it wasn't just sustaining your family for your existence, it went beyond that, where the demand for certain products was actually created.  

International trade, it was the first time period when international trade was so extensive, and purchasing power it was the time period when people had the material wealth in order to purchase more things, in order to buy more things, to acquire more things.  

Sometimes those things would be land, sometimes they would be ships, sometimes they would be luxury items, such as jewelry and pottery.  

This is the first time period when people were able to borrow money to purchase what we call today insurance.  

When you were trying to insure your ship, when you were trading goods. 

And as Dr. Wootton talked about, the level of trust or distrust, how much of an impact that had on securing credit and securing insurance. 

So, these are the kinds of things that today we still live with. 

These are the things that impact the way we operate our businesses as part of our democracy here in the United States.  

And the end, and questions. 
[00:47:21;13]
[applause]

>> Dr. Wahby:
Any questions.  

>> Dr. ??:
Thank you.  

First of all, let me say that this was wonderful, and I actually learned a fair amount.  

And some of it was also familiar territory as well.  

I'll mention another contribution for the ancient Greeks to modern and that is the Piraeus was if anything possibly more crowded than the main city of Athens and that was of course the port of entry. 

And lots of, it was crowded, it was noisy, it probably smelled bad, and it had lots of different languages and dialects spoken and so on and of course many hubs are like that today, are they not?  

So, also I’ll add something about slaves. 

Another thing that slaves did was that they verified coinage.  

Coins that circulated in Athens and this started in the mid-6th century.  

A lot of times when you look at, not just Athenians, but Corinth and other coins too, you see little notches and such[00:48:27;21] in them that shows ok so they verified that these coins were pure, so that was something that slaves were trained to do  

And finally I'll just mention one other thing, with regard to the accounts, the expenditures for the Parthenon, this is sort of the tail end of it and I am going to say a couple things about this next week about the other end of it, the starting point.  

Where we talk about the tributes coming in from the Deleon league, which is where this money came from, and we have very detailed records of that too.  

We have the so-called attribute lists that began in 454 when they moved the treasury from Delos to Athens. 

And these tribute lists were put on display for anybody to see, and there's a question about how much literacy prevailed in Athens.  

It was a democracy you needed a fair amount of literacy so probably most people could read, and certainly most citizens, and so it's a very detailed accounting of the amounts of the foroid, the tributes coming in from each of the member states, and then of course those are the revenues that we see we see their destination in this account right here, so. 

>> Dr. Wahby:
Thank you. 

We have time for a couple of questions if you have any questions.  

Any questions? 

Yes. 

We have one veteran professor here.

>> ??
Retired.  

My question is to Bill.  

Because it is an accounting question.  

I understand that double entry bookkeeping began in Venice during the renaissance.  

How come the Greeks didn't come up with double entry bookkeeping a little quicker? 

>> Dr. Wootton:
Yeah, that is amazing. 

It's like you said. 

Accounting started 5000 years ago, but normally they say the debit/credit didn't get here till about 1450 in Italy.  

So we went through all these great civilizations and at that time everything was in narrative.  

You made the entry, but it was basically in words and numbers so you didn't have the as you were saying, the balancing the debit with the credit.  

So, it's amazing that we went that long and it was never even thought of. 

>> Dr. Wahby:
Any other questions?  

I have a couple of quick questions. 

 What kind of coins did you have, or paper, what kind of currency they had?

>> Dr. Wootton:
A lot of it was silver coins.  

They had silver mines, and they had supposedly the purest coin in that area.  

There was more value placed on their coins than on than from the other city-states.  

>> Dr. Wahby:
Ok, another question. 

Who decided the price of things?  

For example, who said the pound would be such and such, or this, how much things are priced? 

Anybody has any idea? 

Or just, did they have this I give you this amount of grains, you give me this amount of metal or 

>> Dr. Wootton:
In relation to the journal entry slot, was traded five bushels of wheat for twenty casts of wine, it was always X for X, you know, there was not value assigned to each of the items.  

There was some actually purchased with coin in the market place.  

Right, and what the market would bear, essentially, so it was the beginning of pricing as we know it, but there was some exchange of product for coin, in addition of product for product.  

And it would be, the price would be determined by the person at the marketplace who was selling their goods. 

>> Dr. Wahby:
Great.  

Obviously you couldn't cover everything in this session, and so please email them any questions you'd like, and they'll be happy to answer that.  

And I guess we got a good deal today.  

Buy one, for free get two.  

Thank you very much.