Ancient tales of gold's history shine brightest
By John Aloysius Farrell, Globe Staff, 10/23/2000
n the fall of 1532, Francisco Pizarro and 200 Spanish soldiers climbed high into the Andes and conquered an empire of 3.5 million native people. The Spaniards were lured by their greed for gold. They invited Atahualpa, the Incan emperor, to a peace parley and then seized him in a surprise attack. Atahualpa promised to fill a room with gold if Pizarro set him free. The Spaniards agreed, collected the gold, and then offered the emperor a choice: He could burn at the stake as a heathen, or convert to Christianity and be garroted. Atahualpa chose the less painful death.
But the Spaniards' lust for gold proved a curse. They squabbled among themselves and few made it home to Spain with their riches. Pizarro's envious foes had him murdered by a pack of sword-wielding assassins. Spain paid for its greed as well. It plundered its colonies in the New World, packing the holds of its treasure fleets with five times as much gold as existed in all of Europe during the 16th century. But the Spanish frittered away their riches, power, and empire.
The saga of Pizarro and Atahualpa is just one of many offered by veteran financial journalist Peter L. Bernstein in ''The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession.'' Here, from the days of King Midas to the era of the International Monetary Fund, are instructive tales about the lengths to which men have gone for the sake of gold, and about the strange and often fatal hold the precious metal has had on mankind.
With style, Bernstein traces the story of gold down through the centuries, showing a keen eye for the fascinating detail when retelling ancient myths and history. The purity of gold is defined in carats, for example, after a centuries-old way of measuring: The pods of the carob tree, each of which weighs one-fifth of a gram, are called carats, and were used by ancient traders to balance the scales when weighing gold.
Or consider the Greek legend of Jason and the Argonauts, and their search for the Golden Fleece. In ancient Greece, it turns out, prospectors would pan the streams using woolly sheepskins to catch gold flakes and nuggets. It wasn't just Jason who lusted for a golden fleece.
We learn of Egyptian queens who would gild their faces with gold dust, of the emergence of slavery as a way to find workers to labor in the deadly Nubian gold mines, of mighty Croesus and the first imperial currency, and of the wealthy Roman financier Crassus who helped bankroll Julius Caesar's rise to power.
Crassus was an innovator. He made his fortune by organizing a fire brigade that would put out fires only at the properties of those who paid him in advance: an early form of fire insurance. He also trafficked in real estate, buying up the charred ruins of those who failed to hire him, razing the structures to build new homes, and securing his trade by bribing public officials. When he failed to conquer the Parthians in 53 BC, they recognized his greed, and killed him by pouring molten gold down his throat.
Then there are the Byzantine emperors, whose savagery and treachery were as famous as the skills of their goldsmiths. The emperor Irene blinded her 10-year-old son and seized his throne, only to be overthrown by her finance minister, Nicephorus. He in turn was killed in war against the Bulgars, who lined his skull with silver and used it as a drinking cup.
As an extremely durable, malleable, shiny, and rare metal, gold is recycled, century after century, Bernstein tells us. And the lure of his best stories is also enduring. But the stories of pirate swag and capricious kings peter out when Bernstein gets to the 19th and 20th centuries, and he shifts his attention to international economics.
He spends just two paragraphs on the colorful Klondike gold rush, for instance, but gives us eight pages on Michel Chevalier, a French economics professor who wrote an 1859 treatise on the relationship between gold and inflation.
Indeed, the last hundred pages of Bernstein's book are dominated by his discussion of the decline of the gold standard. While these chapters may be instructive for those who seek to understand the mechanics of international economics, they are not nearly as captivating as the tales of ancient pillage and plunder.
This story ran on page B08 of the Boston Globe on 10/23/2000.
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