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.”
Fig. 30. Coin of Eretria.
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.