Numismata hellenica: a catalogue of Greek coins; with notes, a map ...

Metal Size Weight
EUROPEAN GREECE. 21
ATHENE AtticjE.
Note.—The silver money of Athens is an imperishable monument of the civilization of Greece,
and one of the most perfect, by the completeness of its monetary scale, the accuracy of its weights,
and the great variety of them still extant ; and hence this series is more useful than any other now
remaining, for purposes of comparison and for the general illustration of Greek numismatics.
If we could trust to the testimony of Plutarch, the Athenians coined money earlier than any
people in Greece. He relates, that Theseus caused pieces to be struck which were impressed with
the figure of an ox, and weighed two drachmse, which at that time was the price of an ox. A similar
assertion is made by Julius Pollux (9, 60), and by a scholiast of Aristophanes (Av. 1105).
Plutarch
even imagined the words £Kor6/j/3oiov, Sixd^oiov to refer not to the animals, but to the coins. It
seems clear, however, that all these writers were misled by Philochorus, a celebrated Athenian anti-
quary of the third century B.C., and that the proverb /3oCf tjri yXiiaay ^ifit]Ktv, applicable to
a bribed orator, from which the mistake seems to have arisen, and the antiquity of which is proved
by its having been introduced by .iEschylus into the Agamemnon (v. 36), may be sufficiently explained
by the fact, that the Athenians had no gold coinage of their own, and that the Cyzicene stater, which
bore the type of an ox, served, like Byzants and Florins in England in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, as the gold coin most commonly employed by them {vide Asiatic Greece, Cyzicus). It is
sufficiently clear from the poems of Homer that no coined money existed in his time ;
nor can there
be any difficulty in subscribing to the opinions of the best authorities of antiquity, who believed that
the ^ginetans were the first coiners of money in Greece, probably about the year 740 B.C. (Clinton,
Fast. Hellen. iii. p. 247.) The Athenians, having such ample materials in Mount Laurium, were
undoubtedly not long behind the people of jEgina in adopting their invention. The resemblance in
the two coinages is very remarkable ; and probably the weight of the several denominations was the
same until the time of Solon, as the proportion in which he is said to have reduced the drachma
accords with the difference now observable in the Athenian and jEginetan coins of the same denomi-
nation. The Solonian drachma, which continued to be the standard, nominally at least, as long as
the Athenians coined silver, weighed, on a comparison of all accessible evidence, monumental or historical,
about sixty-seven and a half grains troy. The proofs of this conclusion are stated in my
work on Athens and the Demi (i. p. 472), where, however, an error occurs, into which I was led by
Brondstedt, who, in his " Voyages dans la Grece," published as an octodrachmon a coin of the
Thomas Collection, which at the sale was found to weigh 664 grains, and was therefore a decadrachmon.
It is doubtful whether any pieces of money of eight drachmae were ever struck by the
Athenians ; probably not, as we have now the certainty that the Athenians, like the Syracusans, and
apparently at an earlier time than that people, coined pieces of ten Attic drachmae. These, however,
are extremely rare, and no more than three specimens are known to me.
The monetary scale of Athenian silver consisted of multiples of the drachma, and of multiples and
fractions of the obolus, which was the sixth part of the drachma. The following are the several
denommations, with their weights, as they issued from the mint, supposing the weight of the drachma
to have been as above stated :—
1. Apaxfii) 67'5 grains troy, drachma.
2. Aidpaxfiov
3. TtrpdSpaxiiov . .
4. AiKaSpaxiiov ...
5. '0/3oXdc
6. Tpii)|«0|8o\iov . . .
7. AiuifioXov
8. Tpiw/SoXov
9. T£rpal/3oXov ....
10. nej'T(i/3o\ov ....
The fractions of the obolus in silver were,-
11. Tpiraprij^opiov or
TptTij/jopiov
. . . •
12. H/iio/36Xiov
13. TtTapTtjiiopiov or
135-0
270
675'0
2 drachmse.
4 drachmse.
10 drachmse.
1 1'25 obolus, or one sixth of the drachma.
1 6'87 1 and a half obolus.
22-5
3375
45-0
2 oboli.
3 oboli.
4 oboli.
56-25 5 oboli.
8'45
three fourths of the obolus.
562 one half of the obolus.
TaoTTiuopiov . . 2'8 one fourth of the obolus.
The latter was also called Mxa\Kov, eight xa^Koi or coppers having been equal to an obolus. The
xaXicowc was divided into seven Xcirrd.
Of all these denominations, the only one which had an extensive circulation abroad was the teti-adrachmon,
and for this purpose immense numbers of them were struck. To this circumstance we