Now let us pass on to a remarkable passage in the Etymologicum Magnum (s.v. Ὀβελίσος).
“First of all men Pheidon of Argos struck money in Aegina; and having given them (his subjects) coin and abolished the spits, he dedicated them to Hera in Argos. But since at that time the spits used to fill the hand, that is the grasp, we, although we do not fill our hand with the six obols (spits) call it a grasp full (δραχμὴ) owing to the grasping of them. Whence even still to this day we call the usurer the spit-weigher, since by weights the men of old used to hand (money) over[272].” The writer of this passage evidently regards Pheidon as the first inventor of the art of coining but not of weight standards.
Finally the Parian Marble recounts that, “Pheidon the Argive confiscated the measures ... and remade them and made silver coin in Aegina[273].” Such then is the body of evidence which we possess, all pointing to Aegina as the first place in Greece which saw a mint set up, and to Pheidon of Argos as the first to establish that mint. As we have pointed out above we have nothing but a very dubious statement of Strabo (which is coupled with another most certainly wrong, i.e., that Pheidon was the inventor of every other kind of money as well as silver) as regards the invention of weights by Pheidon, although from the passage in Herodotus already quoted, metrologists one after another have assumed that the measures (μέτρα) meant a metric system in the modern sense, and have not hesitated to build on this somewhat crazy foundation an elaborate Aeginetic system of weights and measures intimately related to each other.
We are then probably justified in assuming that Pheidon coined silver at Aegina. The numismatic evidence coincides with the literary authorities. The coins of Aegina are well known, for from first to last the symbol of the sea tortoise (χελώνη, from which they are called in vulgar parlance tortoises) is found on them. Why Pheidon set up his mint in Aegina instead of in his own city of Argos is not very difficult to understand. Argos was an inland town remote from the highways of commerce, and little in contact with the merchants of the Levant. On the other hand Aegina stood at the portal of central Greece, intercepting the trade of Athens and Corinth; in later days Pericles called it the “eyesore of the Piraeus.” It would be probably here that the Greeks first saw the new invention of the East in the hands of the foreign traders, and it would be here, in a great emporium, that the need of a currency would be most felt. In an inland city like Argos or Sparta bars of bronze or iron would serve well for the small commercial transactions of a very primitive society, as we know that the iron currency actually did at Sparta in historical times. E. Curtius suggested (Numism. Chron., 1870) that the tortoise on the Aeginetan coins, which is the symbol of Ashtaroth who was the Phoenician goddess both of the sea and of trade, may be an indication that the mint was set up in the temple of Aphrodite, which overlooked the great harbour of Aegina. Whilst his hypothesis as regards the origin of the tortoise type on the coin is probably wrong, it is quite possible that the coins were first struck in some temple, as we know that the great shrines of the ancient world served as banks and treasuries, as for example the temple of Athena at Athens, that of Apollo at Delphi, and that of Juno Moneta at Rome. The temple priests of Delphi and other rich shrines had at their command large stores of the precious metals, which in the earliest times doubtless were in the shape of small ingots or bullets, such as the gold talents mentioned in the Homeric Poems.
The temple shrines of Delphi and Olympia, Delos and Dodona were centres not merely of religious cult, but likewise of trade and commerce, just as the great fairs of the Middle Ages grew primarily out of the feast day of the local saint, merchants and traders taking advantage of the assembling together of large bodies of worshippers from various quarters to ply their calling and to tempt them with their wares. The temple authorities encouraged trade in every way; they constructed sacred roads, which gave facility for travelling at a time when roads as a general rule were almost unknown, and what was just as important, they placed these roads and consequently the persons who travelled on them under the protection of the god to whose temple they led in each case, thus affording a safe conduct to the trader as well as the pilgrim; again at the time of the sacred festivals all strife had to cease, the voice of war was hushed, and thus even amidst the noise of intestine struggles and international strife, peace offered a breathing space for trade and commerce. Hence the probability is considerable that the art of minting money, that is, of stamping with a symbol the ingots or talents of gold or silver which had circulated in this simple form for centuries, first had its birth in the sanctuary of some god.
On the whole then we may assume that the bullet-shaped coins of Aegina, which are undoubtedly the earliest coins of Greece Proper, are the Pheidonian currency mentioned in the ancient authors and on the Parian Marble. As silver was probably not at all plenty at Argos, but was brought to Aegina by the traders, Pheidon had every motive for minting at Aegina instead of at his own capital. The fact that the Romans struck silver coins in Campania before they issued any at Rome affords a curious parallel. A local supply of the metal offers the explanation in each case. “It may be also positively asserted that none of the Aeginetan coins are older than the earliest Lydian electrum money, and that consequently the date of the introduction of coined money into Peloponnesus must be subsequent to circ. 700 B.C. It follows that Pheidon was not the inventor of money, for already before his time all the coasts and islands of the Aegean must have been acquainted with the pale yellow electrum coins of Lydia and Ionia[274].”
What then was the standard on which these early coins of Aegina were struck?
The heaviest specimens of these Aeginetan staters or didrachms weigh over 200 grains Troy, but these seem somewhat exceptional. The best numismatic authorities are agreed in setting the normal weight at 196 grains Troy; the drachm consequently weighs 98 grains, and the obol about 16 grains. The origin of this standard has caused much difficulty to metrologists. For it is not the standard of the Babylonian gold shekel of 130 grains, nor of the Babylonian silver shekel of 172 grains, nor again that of the Phoenician silver shekel of 230 grains. Various solutions have been proposed. Brandis[275] regards it as a raised Babylonian silver standard, 172·9 to 196 grains. Mr Head regards it as the reduced Phoenician standard; “The weight standard which the Peloponnesians had received in old times from the Phoenician traders had suffered in the course of about two centuries a very considerable degradation[276].” Others, like Mr Flinders Petrie (Encyclop. Britannica, Weights and Measures), regard it as Egyptian in origin. According to Herodotus (II. 178) the Aeginetans were on terms of friendly intercourse with Egypt; furthermore weights of this standard have been found in Egypt.
Again, Dr Hultsch (Metrol.² p. 188) regards it as an independent standard midway between the Babylonian silver standard (172·9 grs.) on the one hand, and the Phoenician silver standard (230 grs.) on the other, the old Aeginetan silver mina being equivalent in value to six light Babylonian shekels of gold (130 × 6 = 780 grs. = 10300 grs. of silver), assuming that in Greece as in Asia Minor gold was to silver as 13·3:1.