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,
| 130 × 15 | = | 1950 | grs. of silver. |
| 1950 ÷ 10 | = | 195 | grs. |
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archaic knife by the full developed copper coin called the cash, so the Aeginetans and Argives of the days of Pheidon superseded by a real coin ancient monetary-units consisting either of real implements of iron and copper, or bars of those metals of certain definite dimensions, or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.”
Fig. 31. Coin of Cyrene with Silphium plant.
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.
Fig. 32. Coin of Cyzicus with tunny fish.