Note 896 — Chapter XIII · THE FORM-WORLD OF ECONOMIC LIFE (A) MONEY

How difficult it was for Classical man to figure to himself the transformation of a physically indefinable asset like land into bodily money is shown by the stone posts (ὅροι) on land in Greece, which were meant to represent the mortgages on it, and by the Roman method of sale per æs et libram, in which a clod of earth was handed over for a coin in the presence of witnesses. Consequently, trade in goods (properly so called) never existed, nor anything like, for example, a current price for arable land. A regular relation between land-value and money-value was as unthinkable to the Classical mind as such a relation between artistic value and money-value. Intellectual—i.e., incorporeal—products like dramas and frescoes possessed economically no value at all. For the Classical idea of law, cf. p. 81.