CHAPTER II 
ORGANIZED SECURITY MARKETS AND THEIR 
ECONOMIC FUNCTIONS 
Antiquity of Markets.—To establish markets is one of 
the most ancient and fundamental instincts of civilization. 
From the earliest times the development of industry has nec- 
essarily been accompanied, step for step, by the constant cre- 
ation and expansion of markets which could distribute the 
products of industry. Even in darkest Africa the natives, 
still in a state of savagery, are perfectly accustomed to market 
places, where the buyers and sellers among them can meet to 
barter with each other their simple products of the chase and 
the fields. The oldest civilizations of the world had estab- 
lished market places before written history began. The bat- 
tered temple pylons of ancient Egypt, for instance, show us 
the fisherman, the weaver, the potter, the poulterer, the farmer, 
and the metal-worker bartering their several products in mar- 
ket places centuries before currency was invented. 
The markets of the classical world, developing from equally 
crude and primitive trading, attained a broader scope and a 
higher degree of organization, and played a more significant 
part in the processes of civilization, than historians seem to 
appreciate. The famous Agora, long the center of Athenian 
political life, where the just Aristides and the shrewd The- 
mistocles were ostracized from the state, was originally a 
market place which had sprung up at the foot of the Acropolis 
where the seven roads of Attica converged. Long before Solon 
instituted the Athenian coinage system, the fisherman from the 
Pirzus bartered his fish here for the barley of the Attican 
farmers. 
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