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Cathy Holcombe

We live in an age of meritocracy, but there is some debate over what this thing we call merit is.
A narrow definition is merit = ability + effort. A narrower definition still is merit = money. For example, we could debate all day whether Microsoft produces good software, but the proof is in the pudding; it sells.
Yet sometimes this latter definition seems wanting.
As a case in point, Bloomberg News recently broke a story that Bill Gross earned US$290 million in bonuses at the bond manager Pimco in 2013, news which set off a debate in the blogosphere.
Critics hooted, since his funds sorely underperformed after Gross made a crucially bad call on the direction of interest rates that year.
His defenders argued he deserved the bonus. The power of Bill Gross’s personality and reputation had attracted many customers to Pimco; the fees made on those customers is what matters, not whether or he was actually a good custodian of their funds. (Gross has since left the firm.)
Somehow this seems like a very modern-age conversation. One can’t imagine Socrates debating the merits of bonus pools any more than pondering whether we need a new pronoun to describe transgender individuals.
But just to be sure, I checked, asking a number of classics professors what the ancients might have thought of the merit of Pimco bonus situation.
In turns out, the Greeks probably would have asked Bill to return that money.
“The Greeks were constantly worried by excess, especially unearned wealth, and its ostentatious display. This is a big theme in archaic poetry … and in tragedy,” said DL Cairns, a professor of Classics at the University of Edinburgh, who has written about ancient world inequality.
Rightly suspecting I hadn’t read Homer, Cairns pointed out that the nub of Achilles’ complaint against Agamemnon in Book 1 of the Iliad is this: “That those who do all the work get fewer of the rewards, while those in top positions do less but get more.”
Even after the two resolved their conflict, apparently Achilles couldn’t resist rubbing Agamemnon’s nose in it, by giving him a prize for funeral games in which he didn’t even compete.

	The statesman and poet Solon, and the philosopher Aristotle, were among those who disapproved of the 'unlimitedness' of money – something our modern-day gold bugs might like to transfer to today’s central bank printing excesses
Plato even had a view on income ratios, suggesting that the richest citizen should be no more than four times wealthier than the poorest.
“In the world in which he actually lived, the discrepancy would have been much higher, but perhaps not as high as in the contemporary US or UK,” Cairns says.
Richard Seaford of the University of Exeter believes Hellenism offers economic lessons for modern life because Greek societies were the first to be “pervaded” by money, with the possible exception of China. (Money had been used earlier, but not, in Seaford’s view on such as scale until the Greek city-states began to emerge.)
It is not new to us, the idea that one can acquire vast sums of money. But it “was new to the Greeks, who can therefore help us to defamiliarise the nature of money,” Seaford said in a speech delivered to the British Classical Association a few years back.
The statesman and poet Solon, and the philosopher Aristotle, were among those who disapproved of the “unlimitedness” of money – something our modern-day gold bugs might like to transfer to today’s central bank printing excesses.
The playwright Aristophanes’ comedy Wealth is, says Seaford, is probably “the earliest surviving text on economics, a subject that thereafter has become less entertaining”.
He continues: “A rapid dialogue reveals that – whereas one can have enough sex, or loaves, or music, or dessert, or honour, or cakes, or manliness, and so on, money is different: if someone obtains 13 talents (a lot of money), he is eager for sixteen, and if he obtains 16 he swears that life is unbearable unless he obtains 40.”
At the very least, then, it seems the Greeks would have poked fun at the Pimco bonus pool arrangements.
But what about the Romans, then? I’ve watched I, Claudius – surely they would let Gross keep the money?
“Blimey. I really don’t know,” said Mary Beard, a professor of classics at the University of Cambridge. “I don’t think either the Greeks or Romans would have been very keen!”


Would Aristotle find fat bonuses gross?

Bill Gross' US$290 million bonus at Pimco in 2013 set off a debate since his funds sorely underperformed after Gross made a crucially bad call on the direction of interest rates that year. Photo: Reuters

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