The present book develops the thesis Seaford advanced in his grand and deeply engaging Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy (2004, NDPR review). That earlier work described the consequences of monetization on mentality – not just how Greeks of the archaic and early Classical period could think but what they would think. It had a highly complex socio-economic argument, concerned especially about the dynamics of ritual sacrifice. To put it simplistically, money’s fungibility and universal solvency allowed and even encouraged the Greeks to conceive of a single stable substance underlying the contingent and plural empirical world, a conception advanced in (monistic) Presocratic philosophy. The book contended that coinage and an expanding money economy better explain the origins of this extraordinary philosophical position than alternative hypotheses, chief among them the rise in Greek poleis of isonomia and isêgoria. This is because Seaford finds those political circumstances more broadly distributed in the ancient Mediterranean than cities giving rise to this philosophical position, whereas he finds coinage, and the philosophical position, to be localized to Ionia in the 6th century.

Now Seaford seeks to provide macro comparative evidence for his claim: coinage arose in both Ionia and one other place, India, around the same time; and in both places a monistic philosophy arose, including a notion of a unified mind or consciousness. Accordingly, Seaford seeks to describe, for both cases, the generally parallel causal connections between monetization, ritual and sacrificial practice, and the conceptualization in those two places of cosmos, being, and self (especially atman and psuchê).