The numismatic chronicle and journal of the Royal Numismatic Society

POLLUX' ACCOUNT OF ANCIENT COINS. 293
by those of Archippus, in Hercules' Wedding "The
best of men, and my dearest friend ; but when he was
with me he had not even a symbolon." The KoAAv/?oj/ 40
was also, probably some trifling coin ; at any rate Calli-
machus says, speaking about those in Hades " From the
regions where they sell a bull for a collybon," as one
would "
say, for an old song." The poets also mentioned
some tricollybon, a small coin.
(73.) Those who suppose
that Homer, too, shows knowledge of the " bull," the coin
41
so called from its design, or type, in the words
"
worth
a hundred bulls for those worth nine," reckoning the
value of the arms as if by the number of drachms, are
foolish in attributing such a thought to Homer, who
himself testifies that he supposed that exchange did not
formerly take place by coins, but by bartering one thing
for another, as when he says 42 "Thence did the long-
haired Achaeans get them wine, some for bronze, some for
bright iron, others for hides, others for
the^cows
them-
"
(74)
for by opposing the cows to the hides, he
selves ;
clearly refers to the animal, and not to the coin." 43
Some, again, have thought the Peloponnesian coin was
called a tortoise, from its
44
type; whence comes the
proverb "Virtue and wisdom are conquered by tor-
toises;" and in the Helots of Eupolis, there are the words
" the fair-tortoised obol."
40 The value of this coin is quite doubtful. M.Beule (p. 76)
agrees with Prokesch-Osten that it was a lepton,
one-seveuth of
a chalcus, but the latter gives no valid reason for the theory.
42 II. 77, 472.
43 See above, p. 288.
44 The coinage of Aegina, of which the type was a tortoise,
the symbol of the Phoenician Aphrodite, was in early times
(sixth century) universally current in the Peloponnese and the
Greek islands.