We are now come to the most important portion of our task, the development of the Greek and Italic systems. In the Homeric Poems we found the Talanton (or value of a cow in gold) the sole unit of weight, and that only employed for gold. This Talanton has been shown to be the same in weight as the light gold shekel of Asia Minor, which, under the form of coin, we have just been discussing as the Croesean stater and Persian Daric. It was therefore nothing else than the Euboic or Attic stater of historical times, which at all periods and at all places that fall within our knowledge formed the sole unit for the weighing of gold.

Besides the Talanton based on the ox, there was in all probability another higher unit in occasional use in Greece Proper. This was the threefold of the ox-unit. We have already had occasion to notice the small gold talent, called by some writers the Macedonian, which was equal to three Attic staters. The same weight under the name of the Sicilian talent was employed likewise for gold only in the Greek colonies of Sicily and Southern Italy. The conservatism of colonists is too well known to need illustration, and we may with high probability infer that the Greek settlers in Magna Graecia brought the small talent from their original homes. What was the origin of this weight? We have seen that everywhere all over our area the slave is the occasional higher unit. Thus the Irish slave (cumhal) was a unit of account equal to three cows. The slave in the Welsh Laws is equal to 4 cows, whilst in Homer we found a slave woman valued at 4 cows also. From the way in which this notice of her price occurs, it is probable that Achilles did not give a woman of the most ordinary kind as a prize, for had she been the ordinary slave-woman of account, there would have been no need to mention the price, as any one would have known how many cows exactly she was worth. It is then not improbable that three cows were commonly reckoned as the value of a slave, and accordingly the small gold talent, which is the multiple of the ox-unit, is simply the metallic representative of the slave, just as the Homeric Talanton itself is that of the cow.

What the exact weight of this unit was on Greek soil we are now enabled to ascertain by the aid of the treatise on the Constitution of the Athenians known to the ancients as the work of Aristotle, and the brilliant discovery and identification of which by the officials of the British Museum reflects much credit on British scholarship.

We had previously known from Plutarch (who ascribed the first coinage of Athens to Theseus[365]) that amongst his other reforms Solon caused drachms to be coined of lighter weight than those previously in currency, so that 100 of the new ones would be equal in value to 73 old ones. Some scholars have inferred that this was an expedient for relieving debtors, who would be allowed to pay in the new coin debts contracted in the older currency. The newly discovered Constitution dispels this assumption, and also affords us some most valuable additional matter[366]: “In his Laws then he appears to have made these enactments in favour of the people, but before his legislation he appears to have wrought the cancelling of debts, and afterwards the augmentation of the measures and weights, and the augmentation of the currency. For in his day the measures likewise were made larger than those of Pheidon, and the mina, which previously had almost seventy drachms, was filled up by a hundred drachms[367]. But the ancient type was the didrachm[368], and he also made as a standard[369] for his coinage 63 minas weighing the talent, and the minae were apportioned out by the stater, and the other weights.”

The first point to engage our attention is the formation of a new standard for the silver coin (for no gold was coined for nearly two centuries): sixty-three old minas were taken to form a new talent, which of course was divided henceforward into 60 new minas. As the weight of the Attic talent in post-Solonian times is most accurately known, we can at once discover the weight of the ancient mina by dividing the ordinary weight of the talent (405,000 grs.) by 63: 405,000 ÷ 63 = 6428 grs., that is 322 grs. less than the post-Solonian mina of 6750 grs. As there are 50 staters in the mina, the ancient stater weighed 128·56 grs., or just a grain lighter than the Daric (129·6 grs.). The old mina of 6428 grs. had been equal to 70 drachms; each of these then must have weighed 92 grs. nearly, that is, the ordinary weight of an Aeginetic drachm. There can be no doubt that the coins of Aegina were used as currency at Athens before Solon’s time, where they circulated side by side in all probability with the coins of Euboea which bore the bull’s head, whence arose the tradition of the earliest coinage of Athens consisting of didrachms stamped with an ox. The old mina (63 of which went to the new silver talent) was of course the ancient standard used for weighing gold and silver before coined money was employed. It was that known as the Euboic, based on the ox-unit. The Aeginetic standard was only used for silver, gold at all times being weighed by the Euboic standard even where the Aeginetic was in use for silver. This standard was of course in full use for gold and evidently likewise for silver in prae-Solonian times, even though the Aeginetic drachms passed as currency at Athens. For if they had adopted the Aeginetic standard, 100 Aeginetic drachms would have been reckoned to the mina, but as only 70 drachms went to the mina it is evident that the old ox-unit (so-called Euboic) standard of unit 130 grs. with its corresponding mina was always the national Athenian standard.

We showed at an earlier stage that in the age when the art of coining was first introduced into Greece by Pheidon of Argos, it was probable that gold stood to silver in the proportion of 15:1. For convenience, then, in Peloponnesus and in Central Greece a system was adopted by which 10 pieces of silver were equivalent to one piece or ingot of gold. This system, known as the Aeginetic, was thus obtained.

Gold being to silver as 15:1,

1 gold ingot (Talanton) of 130 grs. × 15 = 1950 grs. of silver, 1950 grs. ÷ 10 = 195 grs.

Therefore 1 gold Talanton of 130 grs. = 10 pieces of silver of 195 grs. each.

It is possible that this method of making 10 silver pieces equal to one gold unit was developed at the time of the introduction of coined money, but it is more likely that it may have been in use even before that time.

Now it is worth observing that all through the classical period of Greek history the term stater is generally confined in use to gold pieces. Thus silver coins, unless they weighed 135 grs., are not described as silver staters, but are regularly termed didrachms. So general evidently was this practice that the adjective chrysous (χρυσοῦς) was regularly employed to express the gold unit, the masculine gender showing that the noun understood is stater (στατήρ). Thus Pollux says: “Some were termed staters of Darius, some Philippeans, other Alexandrians, all being of gold, and if you say gold piece, stater is understood: but if you should say stater, gold is not absolutely to be understood[370].” From the fact that Pollux draws attention to the exceptional use of stater to express a silver coin, on the principle that exceptio probat regulam, it is evident that stater regularly represents a gold piece of two Attic drachms. The familiar practice in Attic Greek, when speaking of a considerable sum of silver without employing either the term mina or talent, is to say 1000 drachms, 2000 drachms and the like, but not 1000 staters or 2000 staters, etc., whilst on the other hand, under like conditions, the practice is to enumerate gold not by drachms, but by staters. Thus in a fragment from the Demi of Eupolis quoted by Pollux[371] a man is described as possessing 3000 staters of gold. We certainly hear of an Aeginean stater and a Corinthian[372] stater (both of silver), but both are found in writers of comparatively late date, when usage was getting less exact, and besides, as the Aeginetic system had a separate individuality of its own, its unit being perfectly different from the Euboic Attic, might with justice be termed a stater. We are thus justified in considering the gold stater the legitimate descendant of the Homeric Talanton, the stater or weigher representing the Talanton or weight of the older time. As long as no other unit than the ox-unit or Talanton was employed, the Talanton or weight par excellence was sufficient to describe it, but when under Asiatic influences the higher unit of the mina (μνᾶ) and talent were introduced, a term was substituted which indicates clearly that the gold unit of 130 grs. was the weigher or basis of the whole system. Starting then with our ox-unit, we find already in Homer definite traces of a decimal, but nothing to indicate the existence of a sexagesimal system. Ten talents of gold are mentioned in several passages.

Starting then with the ox-unit of 130 grs. we can thus arrive at the fully elaborated Greek systems. The term mina (μνᾶ) is beyond doubt a borrowing from the East. How far it was ever much employed in the reckoning of gold it is hard to say, but it is at least remarkable that, when we hear so frequently of minae of silver in the Attic writers, no instance of a mina of gold is quoted in our books of reference. From this one is led to infer that it was for the purpose of measuring the less precious metal, silver, that the term mina was brought into use in Greece. In fact, as stater is essentially a term which clings to gold, so mina is especially a term used of silver. With the mina the Greeks borrowed likewise the highest Asiatic unit (the kikkar of the Hebrews), which became the Talanton or talent of historical Greece. But it is remarkable that the Greeks did not borrow its Asiatic name along with the unit itself. They simply gave it their own name weight (literally, ‘that which can be lifted,’ cp. τλάω, tollo, etc.). This fact can be explained readily if we suppose that the Greeks, like all those other primitive peoples whom we have mentioned, had a rough and ready unit for estimating bulky wares, the standard of the load, or as much as a man could conveniently carry on his back. Having already such a unit they would have no difficulty in adopting the load or talent, which had been fixed according to the Sexagesimal system, and which had permeated all Western Asia. In fact their position towards the Asiatic load, which had been accurately fixed by the mathematical skill of the Babylonians, would be exactly analagous to that of the Malays of Java and Sumatra towards the accurately adjusted Chinese picul. Because the Malays themselves were accustomed to use loads of various weights as their rough highest unit of bulk, they have with all the more readiness received the form of the same unit, which the clever Chinese have incorporated into their commercial weight system by making it equal to 100 chings (catties, or pounds). But it is doubtful if at any time in Greece Proper the talent of gold was ever considered as a monetary unit. We have found Eupolis speaking of “3000 staters of gold” instead of simply saying a talent of gold, and when we do find mention made of talents of gold, as in a famous passage of Thucydides, where he describes the amount of gold employed by Pheidias in the making of the world-renowned chryselephantine statue of Athena for the Parthenon, whilst the computations in silver are expressed simply by talents, the gold is enumerated as talents in weight. We may assume that gold was weighed throughout Greece in historical times on the following system:

When silver came into use it was probably weighed all through Hellas, as in Asia and Egypt, on the same standard as gold. This continued always to be the practice amongst the great trading communities of Euboea, Chalcis and Eretria, and their colonies, and also with Corinth and her daughter states. Hence the system was commonly known as the Euboic, sometimes as the Corinthian, and in later times, for a reason to be presently given, the Attic. But in this silver system it is no longer the stater which represents the smaller unit, but rather the drachm (δραχμή). Furthermore we find in most constant use a subdivision of the drachm called the obol (ὀβολός nail or spike), six of which made a drachm. There can be no doubt that this silver obolos represented the value in silver of the ancient copper unit from which it took its name, which itself was not estimated by weight but probably, as we saw above, was simply appraised by measure, as is done by all primitive peoples in the estimation of copper and iron, nay even in the very earliest stage of gold itself (p. 43). As six of these nails or obols made a handful (δραχμή) in the ancient copper system, so when each of them was equated to a certain amount of silver, the equivalence in silver was called an obol, and the six silver obols obtained the old name of handful or drachm. In the ordinary Greek system of reckoning silver it is 100 drachms, not 50 staters, of silver which form the mina. But of course at the earlier stages of the use of silver we may with some boldness assume that silver was simply weighed by the stater (or Homeric Talanton).

It is important then to note that among the smaller weight denominations silver has virtually no term peculiarly its own: for we have seen that stater belongs essentially to gold, whilst drachm and obol have originated in the use of copper. This is in complete harmony with what we know of the history of the metals themselves, gold and copper being known and employed long before men had learned to utilize silver; and so too, we find the late-introduced term mina in especially close connection with the latest employed of the three metals. This Euboic-Attic silver system may be stated as follows:

The Corinthians, whilst making the obol of the same weight as the Euboic, made a different division of the silver stater; for as Corinth occupied the very portals of Peloponnesus where the Aeginetic system was universal, she found it convenient for purposes of exchange to divide her silver stater of 135 grs. into three drachms of 45 grs. each, one of which was for practical purposes identical with the Aeginetan half drachm. Thus two Corinthian drachms of 45 grs. each were equal to one Aeginetan drachm of 90 grs.

The Aeginetan Standard.

The desire to obtain 10 silver pieces equivalent in value to the gold ox-unit induced the Aeginetans, who were famous merchantmen, to make a silver system distinct from that of gold. Gold being to silver as 15:1,

With the Aeginetans as with the Euboeans in their silver system, the ancient copper units of the nail and handful played an important part. The story of Pheidon[373] having hung up in the temple of Hera at Argos the ancient currency of nails of copper and iron as soon as he struck his first issue of silver coins, if not absolutely true in all details, at least contains a most probable statement of what did actually take place when a real silver currency was first introduced. We have seen how the Chinese, starting with a barter currency of real hoes and knives, the objects of most general demand, gradually replaced those larger and more cumbrous articles by hoes and knives of a more diminutive size, until finally they became a real currency when they had been so reduced in size as to be utterly unfit for practical use. We saw likewise how that at the present moment the real hoe is the lowest unit of barter among the wild tribes of Annam, and that small bars of iron of given size are used in Laos, and that plates of metal ready to be made into hoes, and hoes themselves, are employed by the negroes of Central Africa, whilst on the west coast axes of a size too diminutive for actual use are employed as a real currency. As the day came when the Chinese finally replaced the archaic knife by the full developed copper coin called the cash, so the Aeginetans and Argives of the days of Pheidon superseded by a real coin ancient monetary-units consisting either of real implements of iron and copper, or bars of those metals of certain definite dimensions, or possibly mere Lilliputian representatives of such, which had previously served them as a true currency. On the whole however it is safest to assume from the names nail (Obol) and Handful (drachme) that the form in which copper or iron served as currency in Peloponnesus and the mainland of Hellas in general was that of rods of a certain length and thickness. We have cited already many analogous forms from modern Asia and Africa, and from the ancient Kelts, to which we shall presently add the ancient Italians. But just as we found that in the Soudan, whilst the slave and ox were universally the higher units of value, each particular district had its own distinctive lower unit according to the nature of its products and requirements, so it is most likely that there were many different units of value (but all alike sub-multiples of the cow) in use among the various Greek communities. It is also probable that they must have exercised a certain effect in the formation of the units of silver currency. Nor is evidence wanting for this. I have already maintained (p. 5) that the fact of the occurrence of the type of the cow, or cow’s head, on early Greek coins is evidence that the original monetary unit was the ox. Thus we find the forepart of an ox on the early electrum staters of Samos of the Phoenician standard (217 grs.), which was probably equivalent to a pure gold ox-unit of 130 grs. The bull’s head also appears on the electrum coins of Eretria and of other places in Euboea. But it is with the silver currency that we are now especially concerned. Whilst it was extremely likely that silver coins might in process of time bear the impress of an ox, the general unit of currency, it was still more natural that, as pieces of silver supplanted as units not the ox but its sub-multiples, that is the particular series of articles of barter in use in any particular district, so these silver coins should bear some traces in their types of the ancient units thus supplanted. That eminent scholar Colonel Leake many years ago remarked that the types of Greek coins generally related “to the local mythology and fortunes of the place, with symbols referring to the principal productions or to the protecting numina.”

Modern scholars have more and more lost sight of the doctrine contained in the words which I have italicized, and directed all their efforts to giving a religious signification to everything[374]. The forepart of the Lion and the Bull on the coins of Lydia become symbols of the Sun and Moon, the Tortoise on the didrachm of Aegina is regarded as a symbol of Aphrodite, the Ashtaroth of the Phoenicians, in her capacity of patron divinity of traders; even the silphium plant of Cyrene, which yielded a salubrious but somewhat unpleasant medicine, is regarded not as holding its place on the coins of Cyrene and its sister towns because it formed the chief staple of trade, but because forsooth it may have been the symbol of Aristaeus, “the protector of the corn-field and the vine and all growing crops, and bees and flocks and shepherds, and the averter of the scorching blasts of the Sahara.” There is probably just as much evidence for this as there is for believing that the beaver on some Canadian coins and stamps is symbolical of St Lawrence, after whom the great Canadian river is named, the warm skin of the beaver indicating that the saint of the red-hot gridiron is the averter of the cruel and biting blasts that sweep down from the icy North. I do not for a moment mean that mythological and religious subjects do not play their proper part in Greek coin types. But it is just as wrong to reduce all coin types to this category as it would be to regard them all as merely symbolic of the natural and manufactured products of the various states. If however we can show that certain coins, even in historical times, were regarded as the representations of the objects of barter of more primitive times, we shall have established a firm basis from which to make further advances.

In those now famous Cretan inscriptions found at Gortyn[375] certain sums are counted by kettles (lebetes, λέβητες) and pots (tripods, τρίποδες). Some have thought that these are the same objects which are called staters in later forms of the same documents. But recently M. Svoronos[376] has advanced a very plausible hypothesis that the lebetes and tripods of the inscriptions really refer not to an actual currency in the kettles and pots of the old Homeric times, but to certain Cretan coins which are countermarked with a stamp, which he recognizes in many examples as a lebes, and in at least one case as a tripod. Whether the first hypothesis, that actual kettles and pots were indicated in the earlier inscriptions and that they had been replaced afterwards by coins, or the hypothesis of M. Svoronos, be true, is immaterial for us. In either case there is evidence of a direct and unbroken succession which connects the silver currency of Crete with an earlier currency of manufactured articles. The very fact that a lebes or a tripod stamped upon a coin gave it currency, not merely in the town of issue but among neighbouring states, indicates that in a previous age the common unit of currency corresponding in value to the coin so marked was an actual lebes or tripod. Such is the evidence preserved for us in this remote corner of Hellas where life moved slowly, and where the archaic style of writing known as boustrophedon (the lines going from right to left and left to right alternately, as the plough turns up and down the field) still lingered on long after it had disappeared from every spot on the mainland of Greece. If then amongst the symbols which appear on the earliest coins of Greek communities, which began very early to strike money, we can find some which have not been identified as religious, and which we can show represent objects which actually did or may well have formed a monetary unit in such places, we shall have advanced a step further; and if we succeed in making good this fresh position, we may in turn find a nonreligious explanation for certain types, which at present are regarded as mythological symbols.

The types with which we shall deal must be those found on the most archaic coins, and which therefore date from a time when barter was just being replaced by a monetary currency. Thus in the case of cities like Athens and Corinth, which began to coin at a comparatively late period and which had been long accustomed to use the issues of other states before they struck money of their own, we should hardly expect to find any trace of the old local barter-unit in their coin types, as such a unit had long since been replaced by the foreign coins.

Let us first turn to the well-known type of the tunny fish (πηλαμύς, θύννος), vast shoals of which were continually passing through the sea of Marmora (Propontis) from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean[377]. This type appears invariably upon the electrum coins of Cyzicus, and a tunny’s head is found upon some very archaic silver coins from the Santorin ‘find’ which Mr Head places at the top of the whole Cyzicene series, but no one has, as far as I am aware, yet hitherto attempted to mythologize it[378], although the fecundity of this fish would make it just as suitable an emblem for Aphrodite as the “lascivious turtle,” and the traders of Cyzicus might quite as well wear the badge of the goddess of the sea as the merchants of Aegina, for there is just as much or just as little evidence for Phoenician influences at Cyzicus as there is at Aegina. From what we have learned in an earlier chapter we know that the articles which form the staple commodities of a community in the age of barter virtually form its money. In a city like Cyzicus whose citizens depended for their wealth on their fisheries and trade, rather than on flocks or herds and agriculture, the tunny fish singly or in certain defined numbers, as by the score or hundred and the like, would naturally form a chief monetary unit, just as we found the stock fish employed in mediaeval Iceland. Are we not then justified in considering the tunny fish, which forms the invariable adjunct of the coins of Cyzicus, as an indication that these coins superseded a primitive system in which the tunny formed a monetary unit, just as the Kettle and Pot counter-marks on the coins of Crete point back to the days when real kettles formed the chief medium of exchange? But far stronger evidence is at hand to show that the tunny fish was used as a monetary unit in some parts of Hellas. We have had occasion to refer to the city of Olbia which lay on the north shore of the Black Sea. It was a Milesian colony, and was the chief Greek emporium in this region. There are bronze coins of this city made in the shape of fishes, and inscribed ΘΥ, which has been identified as the abbreviation θύννος, tunny. Others are inscribed ΑΡΙΧΟ, which Koehler read as τάριχος, salt fish, but which the distinguished German numismatist Von Sallet[379] regards as meaning a basket (ἄρριχος). He holds those marked ΘΥ as the legal price of a tunny fish, those marked ΑΡΙΧΟ as that of a basket of fish[380]. When we recall the Chinese bronze cowries, the Burmese silver shells, the silver fish-hooks of the Indian Ocean, the little hoes and knives of China, and the miniature axes from Africa, we are constrained to believe that in those coins of Olbia, shaped like a fish, we have a distinct proof of the influence on the Greek mind of the same principle which has impelled other peoples to imitate in metal the older object of barter which a metal currency is replacing. The inhabitants of Olbia were largely intermixed with the surrounding barbarians, and may therefore have felt some difficulty in replacing their barter unit by a round piece of metal bearing merely the imprint of a fish, while the pure-blooded Greek of Cyzicus had no hesitation in mentally bridging the gulf between a real fish and a piece of metal merely stamped with a fish, and did not require the intermediate step of first shaping his metal unit into the form of a tunny. We shall find that this tendency to shape metal into the form of the object which it supplants may perhaps be traced in the coins of Aegina and Boeotia.

In the same quarter of Hellas we find another instance of a coin type which may be regarded as evidence that the silver coin which bears it was the representative of an older barter unit. The island of Tenedos, lying off the Troad, struck at a very early date silver coins bearing for device a double-headed axe (the Latin bipennis). This “Axe of Tenedos” (Τενέδιος πέλεκυς) was explained by Aristotle[381] as a reference to a decree of a king of Tenedos which enacted that all who were convicted of adultery should be put to death. This explanation is probably a bit of mere aetiology to explain the existence of an emblem, the true origin of which had been forgotten. However, it yields one important result, for it shows that the emblem was not religious. Had that been its nature, priestly conservatism would have kept an unbroken tradition of its origin. But from another source some light may be obtained: Pausanias[382] in the 2nd century A.D. saw at Delphi axes dedicated according to tradition by Periclytus of Tenedos, and then proceeds to relate the following tale: Tennes, an old King of Tenedos about the time of the Trojan War, cut with an axe the ropes with which his father Cycnus had moored his ship to the shore, when he came to ask pardon of Tennes for having cast him and his sister in a chest into the sea, in a fit of anger caused by the false accusation of a stepmother. We may gather that according to this form of the legend the Janiform head, male and female, on the obverse of the coins of Tenedos alludes to the brother and sister. But Pausanias makes no attempt to connect Periclytus in any way with Tennes except as being a native of Tenedos. This is hardly enough to account for the dedication of the axes at Delphi. Two explanations suggest themselves. It was the custom of kings or communities to send offerings to Delphi of the best products of their land. Thus Croesus sent vast quantities of his Lydian electrum, and, still more to the point, the people of Metapontum in South Italy, whose land was famous for its wheat, after an especially favourable harvest sent to Delphi a wheat-ear (υέρος) of gold. Were the double axes in like fashion an especial product of Tenedos? Or was this dedication analogous to that of Pheidon when he hung up in the temple of the Argive Here the ancient nails and bars? The first explanation is the more probable, for there was no reason why the Tenedians should not have dedicated their cast off currency of axes in some temple at home. I have already mentioned the hoe currency of ancient China, and the axes used as such in Africa. I shall now show that such double-axes as those stamped on the coins of Tenedos formed part of the earliest Greek system of currency. I have already enumerated the various articles used in barter in the Homeric poems. The prizes offered in the Funeral games of Patroclus are of course merely the usual objects of barter and currency, slavewomen, oxen, lebetes, tripods, talents of gold and the like. “But he (Achilles) set for the archers dark iron, and he set down ten axes (πελέκεας), and ten half-axes (ἡμιπέλεκκα)[383].” The axe is undoubtedly of the same kind as that on the coins of Tenedos, the name (pelekys) being the same in each case, and the Homeric one beyond doubt is double-headed like the Tenedian, since the half-axe (hemi-pelekkon) must obviously mean a single-headed axe[384]. The double-axes formed the first prize, the ten half-axes the second, for “Meriones took up all the ten axes, and Teucer bore the ten half-axes to the hollow ships[385].” These axes and half-axes then seem to go in groups of ten as units of value, the half-axes representing half the value of the double-headed. If then the kettle and tripod of Homeric times are found as symbols on the coins of Crete, why may not the axe on those of Tenedos represent the local unit of an earlier epoch? and that such axes were evidently an important article in Tenedos is proved by the dedication at Delphi.

But could we only find a contemporary description of the type on one of the earliest coins of Asia Minor, the cradle of the art of coining, we might get our ideas on the nature of the coin types greatly cleared. Fortunately such an opportunity is afforded to us by an unique coin in the British Museum, the oldest as yet known which bears an inscription. It is an oblong electrum coin (Fig. 35), the reverse having the usual incuse, but on its obverse it bears a stag feeding, and over it runs (retrograde) in archaic letters I AM THE MARK OF PHANES (Φανος εμι σεμα = Φάνους εἰμὶ σῆμα). There can be no doubt that the mark of Phanes is the stag. If there was no inscription it would have been at once asserted that the stag was the symbol of the goddess Artemis, and who could deny it? But as it stands it is plain that the stag is nothing more than the particular badge adopted by the potentate Phanes, when and where he may have reigned, as a guarantee of the weight of the coin and perhaps the purity of the metal. The Daric itself needs no inscription to tell us that its type is not religious. The figure of the Great King with his spear and bow and quiver can hardly be allegorized even by an Origen[386]. Emboldened by these instances we may even hold up our hands against the host of Heaven, and raise doubts as to whether the foreparts of the lion and bull upon the coins of Lydia represent the Sun-god and the Moon-goddess. May not the lion simply be the royal emblem? I have already suggested this explanation for the lion weights of Assyria. Undoubtedly from the earliest times the king of beasts (as in Aesop’s Fables) was regarded in the East as the true badge of royalty. “The Lion of the tribe of Judah” is familiar to us all, and it is more rational to regard the lions which guarded the steps of Solomon’s throne as emblems of kingship rather than as symbols of the Sun. Is then the Lion on the coins of Lydia nothing more than the kings badge, just as the stag is the badge of Phanes? But what about the bull or cow? Shall I go too far if I regard it as indicating that the coin is the ox-unit? When the Greeks borrowed the art of coining from Lydia it is easy to understand that they would likewise borrow the type either in a complete or modified form, and hence it is that we find the lion or lion’s head on the coins of Miletus[387], the lion’s scalp on those of Samos (on which the cow’s head also is found), the lion’s head on the coins of Cnidus, of Gortyn in Crete, at Rhodes, at Miletus, and at the Phocaean towns of Velia in Lucania, and Massalia in Gaul, and put by the Samian exiles on their coins at Zancle. If the Greeks had been barbarians they would have slavishly copied the lion coins of Lydia, just as the Gauls copied the lion of Massalia, and at a later time the stater of Philip, and as the Himyarites of South Arabia, the “owls” of Athens[388], and as in mediaeval times the Danes of Dublin copied the coins of the Saxon kings[389]. But the artistic genius of the Greeks could submit to no such trammels, and the lion type was varied and diversified according to the fancy of each community. The same holds good of the type of the cow and cow’s head. The Greek genius gave us these beautiful types such as the cow suckling her calf (Dyrrachium), the cow with the bird on her back (Eretria), the cow scratching herself (Eretria), the two calves’ heads seen on the coins of Mytilene, and the magnificent charging bull on the coins of Thurii. The cow or bull’s head on the early gold and electrum coins was the indication of the value. In later times when the connection between ox and coin was only traditional, the ox was put on coins simply as symbolical of money.

Again Phocaea, one of the very earliest Greek towns to issue coins, employed a symbol which cannot be termed religious. Her coins bear a seal (phoca) a type parlant referring to the name of the town. Many examples of the same kind can be quoted, the rose (ῥόδον) on the coins of Rhodes (Ῥόδος) and also on those of Rhoda in Spain, the bee (melitta) on those of Melitaea, perhaps even the owl (χαλκίς) on coins ascribed to Chalcis in Euboea. These considerations will serve to show that we may expect many things on coins besides religious symbols. Thasos was famous for its wine, and accordingly the wine-cup is a regular adjunct of its coins, either standing alone, or held in the hands of old Silenus, who quaffs therefrom a “draught of vintage that hath been cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth.” All who have read Horace remember the fame of the wines of Chios, and accordingly the wine-jar is a regular adjunct of the mintage of that island. Now there is proof that the trade in wine was of extreme antiquity, if not in the islands just mentioned, at least in Lemnos, and that that trade was carried on by barter, for we read in Homer how “many ships stood in from Lemnos bringing wine, which Euneos the son of Jason had sent forward, whom Hypsipyle had borne to Jason shepherd of the folk, but separately for the sons of Atreus, Agamemnon and Menelaus, the son of Jason gave wine to be fetched, a thousand measures. From thence used the flowing-haired Achaeans to buy their wine, some with copper, some with glittering iron, some with hides, others with the kine themselves, others again with slaves[390].” From what we have seen in an earlier chapter it is clear that a measure of wine would have a known value in relation to the various articles here enumerated. Thus in North America where the beaver skin was the unit, a gallon of brandy = 6 skins, a brass kettle = 1 skin, an ounce of vermilion = 1 skin and so on[391]. In other words, the ordinary currency with which the Lemnians would purchase wares from other people who had no wine of their own would be wine, the unit of which was the measure (which elsewhere I have tried to show was the cup δέπας, Smith’s Dict. Antiq. s.v. Mensura). This measure would be the size of the vessel ordinarily employed for wine, probably much the same as the two-handled vase out of which Silenus is seen drinking on coins of Thasos.

With the introduction of silver currency nothing is more likely than that an effort would be made to equate the new silver unit to that which had formed the principal unit of barter. That the earliest types should indicate the object (or its value) which the coin replaced is in complete accord with the statement of Aristotle (quoted on an earlier page) that “the stamp was put on the coin as an indication of value[392].” As no numerals appear on the early Greek coins, it is evident that Aristotle regarded the symbol, whether ox-head, or tunny, or shield, as the index of the value. If it be said that the putting of a cow, or axe, or tunny on a coin was simply a picturesque way of indicating a single unit, we may reply that it is far easier to understand why a certain people chose a particular symbol, if in their minds the object symbolized was identified with the value of the silver or gold coin. It is at all events certain that Aristotle did not regard the type as religious in origin. But we are not without actual evidence that such an equating of the silver unit to the barter-unit really took place in Greece. It is held by the best numismatists that Solon was the first to coin money at Athens. It is also well known that the highest class in his constitution, called Pentacosiomedimni (Five-hundred-measure-men), were rated at 500 drachms. Thus the Olympic victor received 500 drachms to qualify him to be a Five-hundred-measure-man[393]. Furthermore Plutarch distinctly tells us that Solon reckoned a drachm as equivalent to a measure[394] or a sheep. It is hardly possible to doubt that the first Attic coined silver drachm was equated to the old barter unit of a measure (either of corn or oil). The same may be said in reference to the olive sprig which from the earliest issue is found on the coins of Athens. The sacred olive-trees (μορίαι) which belonged to the state, and for the care of which special officials were appointed, and even the very stumps of which, and the spot on which they had grown, were under a taboo[395], were a source of considerable revenue to the state in the 6th century B.C. The fact that they were all supposed to be scions of the sacred olive-tree on the Acropolis, which was itself supposed to be the gift of Athena, and the religious care bestowed on them, puts it beyond doubt that the olive at an early date formed one of the most important products of Attica. The instances given already of the employment of various kinds of food as money are sufficient to show that there is nothing far-fetched in supposing that olives and olive-oil may have been so employed at Athens.