Our observation has been drawn by some modern writers to the supposed existence of a sacred character or quality in the coin of the ancients. It is the opinion of the most experienced numismatists that the Greek coin was invested with a character of sanctity, arising from the head, or figure, or symbol of some deity which it usually bore; that the ἐικών or image upon it was really and truly an idol. We believe that such a notion prevailed, to a certain extent, both among the Greeks and the Romans. Not that we regard the worship of Juno Moneta as a case in point. We think that the worship of Juno Moneta was the worship of a deity who was supposed to have admonished the Romans that there are other things in the world much better worth attending to than money, and that money would not be wanting to them, so long as the weapons they fought with were the arms of justice. At the same time, there was indubitably a reverence paid to the coin, even down to the Roman times, for the sake of its religious symbol or device. The people of Aspendus, in Pamphylia, professed to hold in such reverence the effigy of the Emperor Tiberius upon his coin, that they found a certain fellow-citizen guilty of impiety, simply on the ground of his having administered a little wholesome chastisement to a refractory slave who happened to have at the time one such coin in his pocket.
It has been thought that the practice which prevailed among the Greeks, of placing a piece of coin in the mouth of the corpse, originated in this notion of its sanctity, inasmuch as it was supposed to insure the protection of the deity, whoever it might be, to whom the coin was attached by the symbol it bore. But we must confess that, for our own part, we still cling to the old story of the fee required by the Stygian ferryman. Hercules informs Bacchus, in the Ranæ of Aristophanes, when he is meditating a visit to the shades below, that he will arrive at a wide unfathomable lake, and that an old man who attends for the purpose will ferry him and his companion across it, on receiving the fee of two oboli. Lucian, too, has a joke about Charon’s complaining that, in consequence of the slackness of his trade, he cannot raise money enough to supply the necessary repairs for his boat. The mouth was so commonly used as a purse by the Greek in his lifetime, that we can scarcely wonder at this method being adopted for his carrying money into the other world with him when dead. Colonel Leake mentions the discovery of a coin of Motya in the mouth of a skeleton in the island of Ithaca, in a tomb of the first century before Christ.
At the same time, although we believe that the myth of Charon was more closely connected with this practice in the minds of the common people than any other consideration, we doubt not that the sanctity of the coin was also taken into account. We find that notion of sanctity prevailing, not only among the Greeks and Romans, but among other nations, to a considerable extent. The Mohammedan coin bears invariably a passage from the Koran, or some other religious text, quite sufficient to insure its reverential treatment by the faithful Mussulman; and we read in Marsden’s Numismata Orientalia of a certain class of very rare gold coins of ancient date, to which the Hindoos avowedly paid religious worship. Of this coin the Rajah of Tanjore was so fortunate as to possess two specimens.
Whether the sect of gold-worshippers is yet extinct is a question which we must leave moralists to settle among themselves. It has been remarked by an accomplished scholar and excellent numismatist,[[10]] that “gold has been worshipped in all ages without hypocrisy.” That there were many in ancient times who held the coin in reverence for the sake of an indwelling sanctity connected with the symbolic representations which it bore, we fully believe; and that there may be some in modern times who hold it in reverence,—ἀισχρου κέρδους χάριν,—we are by no means disposed to deny.
There is no doubt that pieces of antique coin have been frequently carried in the purse or in the pocket as a sort of charm or amulet; but we question whether this notion of their supernatural power has any connection with the supposed sanctity of the legends or symbols with which they are impressed. We should ascribe it rather to the same feeling which induces some old women, and young ones too, to carry a crooked sixpence in their purse—the charm being supposed to reside, not in any device or legend of the coin, but simply in its curvilinear shape. So in the cases we have just alluded to, the charm lies in the mystery of the coin’s unknown and ancient origin—“omne ignotum pro magnifico est.” Stukeley tells us that, in the neighbourhood of one of the ancient Roman sites which he visited in his “Iter Curiosum,” Roman coins were known among the peasantry by the appellation of “swine pennies,” from the fact of their being often turned up by that indefatigable excavator in his search after something more succulent. To the mighty Cæsars this was truly a degradation. But at Dorchester he found the same coins known by the name, assigned with more semblance of respect, of “Dorn pennies,” after some mythical king Dor, whom tradition states to have once resided there. The rustic antiquary is wont to labour under a sad confusion of ideas. The Roman he confounds perpetually with the Roman Catholic. We remember ourselves—after visiting a sort of bi-linguar monument near Hadleigh in Suffolk, which marks the spot of the martyrdom of Dr Rowland Taylor, under Queen Mary—to have asked a passer-by whether a certain antiquated mansion by the road-side had ever been inhabited within his recollection; to which we received the oracular reply that, to the best of our rustic friend’s belief, it had never been inhabited since the Romans occupied it, in the days of Dr Taylor!
This, however, is rather a digression. We learn from Trebellius Pollio that, in the fourth century, the coins of Alexander the Great were supposed to insure prosperity to any person who was prudent enough to carry one of them constantly about his person; and we find this, and all other such notions, strongly condemned by Chrysostom. An Italian traveller tells us that, in 1599, the silver coins found in the fields in a certain district in the island of Crete were called by the people after the name of St Helen; and that the story went that this saint, being in want of money, had made a number of coins of brass, endowing them, at the same time, with such miraculous properties, that the brass, in passing into the hands of another person, was at once changed into silver; and, moreover, that any such silver coin being held fast in the hand, will cure the falling-sickness. Mr Pashley, who visited Crete in 1830, found that the possession of an ancient coin is looked upon as a sovereign charm against maladies of the eyes. In the year 1366, the discovery made by some children at play of a number of ancient coins, at Tourves, near Marseilles, threw the whole community of the district into a state of alarm and consternation. The coins were some that had been struck at Marseilles at that early period when, under the name of Massalia, it ranked among the most thriving colonies of ancient Greece. They bore on the one side a head of Apollo, and on the other a circle divided into quadrants. In the chronicles of Provence, where this discovery is recorded, they are described as bearing on the one side a Saracen’s head, and on the other side a cross. This was interpreted as bearing some portentous allusion to the Crusades. And the devout writer intimates that, while one part of the community look upon it as an omen of good, and the other part as an omen of evil, Heaven only knows how it will turn out.
We believe that some persons, sedulously devoted to other branches of the study of classical antiquity, are deterred from availing themselves of the aid of coins, by a fear of being imposed upon by forgeries. This is an easy, but an idle mode of putting aside that which we have not courage to investigate. We shall add a few remarks upon the subject.
In the first place, we shall venture to ask these anti-numismatic sceptics, whether they think we ought to cease to read and to admire the dramas of Shakespeare, because it is questionable whether one or two of those which pass under his name were really of his composition?—or, whether we shall shut our eyes before all pictures which pass under the names of the Old Masters, because spurious ones have been palmed off upon the self-dubbed connoisseur?—or whether all autographs of illustrious men are to be condemned as trash, because Ireland attempted to impose upon the public with some that were not genuine?—or whether all currency is to come to an end, because clever knaves have succeeded in counterfeiting it? Everything, in short, which is valuable, offers, in proportion to its value, a temptation to ingenious and unscrupulous men to show their cleverness by imposing upon the world with an imitation of it. The Holy Scripture itself has not escaped.
And after all, in regard to coins as well as in regard to the other subjects which we have mentioned, although forgers may be clever, detectors are clever also. The numismatic phalanx of investigators are more than a match for the “falsarii.” The skill of Cavino, Gambello, and Cellini, has been met with equal skill on the part of the numismatist. The eye that has been accustomed to wander over a well-selected cabinet acquires a power of ready discrimination,—a power difficult to teach by theory, but not so difficult to gain by practice. Solitary instances may occur of a solitary numismatist fondly persuading himself that some clever forgery which he possesses is a genuine coin, but we would not give much for his chance of beguiling others into the same belief. Unwilling he may be to have the “gratissimus error” extracted from his own mind, but he never will succeed in engrafting it upon others. Never does the eye of man exert so much jealous vigilance as when it is employed upon the coin of a rival numismatist claiming to be genuine upon insufficient grounds, The House of Lords sitting upon a claim of some peerage in abeyance is nothing to it. We apprehend that scarcely an instance is on record of a forged coin having enjoyed for any length of time, unquestioned, the honours of a genuine one. Nor do we think that there are many instances of a forger’s attempting to falsify history. He generally aims at making his invention tally with historical fact as closely as he can. And if his inventive powers are not at all brought into exercise, but he simply produces a coin which is a fac-simile or reproduction of a genuine one, for purposes of study that fac-simile will be equally available with the genuine coin, and no further harm is done than the abstraction of a few shillings more than its value from the pocket of the unwitting purchaser.
At the same time we would not let the forger go unpunished. Though the evil actually done be small, the intention is bad. We would have him tried by a jury of numismatists. Or if the offence should have been committed in a country where the power of punishing the offence resides in one magistrate, we should say that that one magistrate ought to be a numismatist. It is said that a distinguished archæologist who possessed this power in virtue of his office as Her Majesty’s consul at Bagdad, very recently exercised it by directing that a Jew “falsarius” should be bastinadoed. We applaud his Excellency’s most righteous judgment. The man who had counterfeited the famous sequins of Venice, and had aggravated his crime by doing it badly,—