As Greece coined money several centuries before Italy, and as its literature reaches much further back than that of Rome, it is plain that any sound enquiry into the origin of weight standards must commence with Greece. We shall therefore without further preface proceed to investigate the evidence afforded to us by the oldest Greek records.
The Homeric Talent.
In the Homeric Poems, which cannot be dated later than the eighth century B.C., there is as yet no trace of coined money. We find nevertheless in those Poems two units of value; the one is the cow (or ox), or the value of a cow, the other is the Talent (τάλαντον). The former is the one which has prevailed, and does still prevail, in barbaric communities, such as the Zulus of South Africa, where the sole or principal wealth consists in herds and flocks. For several reasons we may assign to it priority in age as compared with the Talent. In the first place it represents the most primitive form of exchange, the barter of one article of value for another, before the employment of the precious metals as a medium of currency; consequently the estimation of values by the cow is older than that by means of a Talent or “weight” of gold, or silver or copper. Again, in Homer, all values are expressed in so many oxen, as “golden arms for brazen, those worth one hundred beeves, for those worth nine beeves[2]” (Il. VI. 236).
The Talent on the other hand is only mentioned in Homer in relation to gold (for we never find any mention of a Talent of silver) and we never find the value of any other article expressed in Talents. But the names of monetary units hold their ground long after they themselves have ceased to be in actual use as we observe in such common expressions as “bet a guinea,” or worth a “groat,” although these coins themselves are no longer in circulation, and so the French sou has survived for a century in popular parlance, and the Thaler has lived into the new German monetary system. Accordingly we may infer that the method of expressing the value of commodities in kine, which we find side by side with the Talent, is the elder of the twain.
Was there any immediate connection between the two systems or were they as Hultsch (Metrologie², p. 165) maintains entirely independent? It is difficult to conceive any people, however primitive, employing two standards at the same time which are completely independent of each other. For instance when we find in the Iliad[3] that in a list of three prizes appointed for the foot-race, the second is a cow, the third is a half-talent of gold, it is impossible to believe that Achilles or rather the poet had not some clear idea concerning the relative value of an ox and a talent. Now it is noteworthy that, as already remarked, nowhere in the Poems is the value of any commodity expressed in Talents; yet who can doubt that Talents of gold passed freely as media of exchange? A simple solution of this difficulty would be that the Talent of gold represented the older ox-unit. This would account for the fact that all values are expressed in oxen, and not in Talents, the older name prevailing in a fashion resembling the usage of pecunia in Latin.
A complete parallel for such a practice can be still found at the present moment among some of the Samoyede tribes of Siberia. Thus we read in the account of a recent traveller: “He finally came to the conclusion that for the consideration of five hundred reindeer, he would undertake the contract. This I regarded as a very facetious sally on his part. The reindeer however I found was the recognised unit of value, as amongst some tribes of the Ostiaks the Siberian squirrel. For this purpose the reindeer is generally considered to be worth five roubles[4].” Again forty years ago Haxthausen[5] tells us that the Ossetes, a Caucasian tribe dwelling not very far from Tiflis, although long accustomed to stamped money, especially on the border of Georgia, kept their accounts in cows, five roubles being reckoned to the cow. Here then in Siberia and in the Caucasus, in spite of a long experience not merely of a metallic unit, but of actual coined money, we still find values estimated in reindeer, and in cows, the older units, just as in Homer they are stated in oxen.
We shall likewise find that when the ancient Irish borrowed a ready made silver unit (the uncia) from the Romans, they had to equate this unit to their old barter-unit the cow, just as in modern times the wild tribes of Annam when borrowing the bar of silver from their more civilized neighbours have had to equate it to their native standard, the buffalo; facts in close accord with the well known derivation of Latin pecunia, money from pecus, English fee from feoh, which still meant cattle, as does the German Vieh, and rupee (according to some) from Sanskrit rupa, also meaning cattle.
Let us now see if we have any data to support this hypothesis. That most trustworthy writer, Julius Pollux, says in his Onomasticon (IX. 60): “Now in old times the Athenians had this (i.e. the didrachm) as a coin and it was called an ox, because it had an ox stamped on it, but they think that Homer also was acquainted with it when he spoke of (arms) ‘worth an hundred kine for those worth nine[6].’ Moreover in the laws of Draco there is the expression, to pay back the price of twenty kine: and at the time when the Delians hold their sacred festival, they say that the herald makes proclamation whenever a gift is given by any one, that so many oxen will be given by him, and that for each ox two Attic drachms are offered: whence some are of opinion that the ox is a coin peculiar to the Delians, but not to the Athenians; and that from this likewise has been started the proverb, an ox stands on his tongue, in case any man holds his tongue for money[7].”
According to Pollux then the Attic didrachm, or at least a coin employed by the Athenians (perhaps certain coins of Euboea), was called an ‘ox.’ Plutarch (Theseus, c. 25) goes further and asserts that Theseus struck money stamped with the figure of an ox (ἔκοψε δὲ νὸμισμα βοῦν ἐγχαράξας), and the Scholiast on the Birds of Aristophanes (1106) quotes from Philochorus, an Athenian antiquary of the third century B.C.[8], the same account of the Attic didrachms being marked with an ox.
On the other hand the highest authorities on numismatics assert that the Athenians never struck any such coins. Yet after making due allowance for the additions made by Plutarch to the more crude statement of Pollux and Philochorus, it is hard to conceive that such a belief could have arisen without some foundation, and a probable solution may be found in the fact that certain uninscribed coins, bearing the type of an ox-head, which in recent years have been assigned to Euboea, are for the most part found in Attica. We know that Eretria, and Chalcis, the great cities of Euboea, were amongst the earliest places in Greece to strike money, and it is quite possible, nay probable, that these Euboic coins formed (along with the Aeginetan didrachms) the currency in use at Athens before the time of Solon (B.C. 596). Why the name ox was especially recollected in after years as that of the earliest currency, we can readily understand; the name derived from the old unit of barter would at once attach itself to the coin which bore the image of the ox, and in the course of time two traditions, one that the ancient unit was the ox, the other that the first coins current at Athens bore the symbol of an ox, would merge into one, and finally patriotic feeling would ascribe the first coinage to Theseus, who was regarded as the father of so many Athenian institutions.