The numismatic chronicle and journal of the Royal Numismatic Society

286 NUMISMATIC CHRONICLE.
the third hemimina, you will mean two minas and a half.
They used the word mina to form part of compound
words, as Herodotus in his fifth book uses the term
16
St'/x.j/a>s ;
writes
(57) and Lysias, in his Speech against Autocrates,
"
There has fallen to my lot also a contribution of
twenty minas (ciKoo-f/Avus).
The gold stater was worth a mina. 17 For in the case of
things weighed they call a mina used as a weight a stater,
and when they speak of the weight of five staters, they are
thought to mean five miuas, as in the Deposit of Sosicrates
" For when, I suppose, a pale, fat, lazy man, accustomed
to luxury, takes up a mattock of five staters, his breath
gets short." (58.) The stater is, however, also a coin, 18
as when Aristophanes says 19
" And we servants play at
odd and even with staters." In the words in the Eccle-
siazmae? " a salvation of four staters," it is uncertain
whether the reference is to weight or to number. But
16 c. 77.
17 There seems to be only one gold stater known worth a
mina, the gold octadrachm of the Ptolemies of Egypt. If the
proportion of value of gold to silver was 12 to 1, these would
be worth 100 silver drachms or one mina. Mommsen, E.M.,
p. 41 ; E. S. Poole in Num. Chron. 1867, p. 163. The statement,
however, may be only an assumption of Pollux made to explain
what follows, which in fact needs no explanation. The stater,
whether of money or weight, is the regulating unit of account,
and that the mina was in weighing such a unit will be readily
understood if we consider the convenience of its weight, about
an English pound. Scaliger amends the passage by omitting
Xpvo-ovs
: but this renders it too trite.
18 In many coinages if not all, the coin which was used as
the unit of reckoning was called the stater. Thus the stater
was of gold in the kingdom of Alexander, ofelectrum at Cyzicus,
of silver in Greece. At Athens it was a tetradrachm, at Corinth
a tridrachm, at Thebes a didrachm.
19
1. 817.
Plutw,
20 1. 413.