Question

Explain the ancient Greek attitude about money, and why the Greeks were suspicious of this Phrygian invention?

Answer 1

The Greeks had a suspicious view of money and it was something they mostly saw as a sort of moral test. Their deities relating to money were tricksters and con artists. We already know that the Greeks had an interesting concept about money, that it was meant to tempt them, but their view of wealth was a little different. The Greeks believed in Public Wealth, or wealth for the good of the people. Their wealth included rich architecture, knowledge, ideas and philosophy.

We all know ancient Greek and Roman follows slave concepts .Only good fortune that piling of money can bring was to free a person from slavery and make him self sufficient. They haven't treated accumulation of wealth as a prestegious thing. Aristotle condemned “the piling up of superfluous fortunes” and in The Laws Plato assigned industry, trade and business activities to migrants. None of this was fit for the ideal Greek citizen to undertake: “The idea that trade and marketing was incompatible with whole-hearted participation in social and political life was deeply rooted.”

Phrygian that look like Greek are not Greek-loans but shared vocabulary. This shared vocabulary and innovations can only be explained by a common ancestor, that is to say a Proto-Indo-European dialect that by time split into Proto-Greek, Proto-Phrygian and maybe Proto-Armenian. Recently, there are discussions whether Thracian fits into this group. That is because the discovery of many non-Greek inscriptions in the Greek island of Samothrake, that record a language relatively close to Greek. Whether that language is Thracian or another unknown Indo-European language remains unclear. It is still too early to know.