The numismatic chronicle and journal of the Royal Numismatic Society

1500 NUMISMATIC CHRONICLE.
have already made collections of such facts. But perhaps
an account of coins should include Croesean, Philippine,
and Doric staters, and the Berenicean, (85) Alexandrine,
63
Ptolemaic, and Damaretean pieces, those whom they are
named after being universally known ; Damarete was the
wife of Gelon, who, when that ruler was in straits in his
war against the Libyans, asked the women for their
ornaments, and melted them down to make coins.
It is at any rate not out of place to mention that the Attic
talent was worth 6,000 Attic drachms ;
the Babylonian,
7,000; (86) the Aeginetan, 10,000; the Syrian, 4,500;
the Cilician, 3,000 ;
the Egyptian, 1,500, reckoned accord-
ing to the Attic drachm, as also the Attic miiia. 64 The
63 All these pieces are extant and well known. Croesus in-
troduced into his kingdom, in the place of the previous coins
of electrum, staters of gold bearing as type the fore-parts of a
bull and a lion (Num. Chron. N.S., xv. 257). In imitation of
these coins, and of the same weight, were the official gold pieces
of the Persian Empire, issued first by Darius Hystaspis, and
called from him Darics. These were in the middle of the fourth
century superseded as the main currency of the world by the
coins of Philip and Alexander. The Ptolemaic tetradrachms
had a wide circulation in the third century, but the hexadrachms
and other coins issued in the name of Berenice II. are comparatively
rare. Conclusive arguments lead us to see in the
Daniareteia the noble silver deoadrachms of Syracuse of early
style (Xum. Chron. N.S., xiv. 9). For Diodorus expressly
states (xi. 26) that the Damareteion was equal to ten Attic
drachms or fifty litreo (grs. 675), which is just the weight of
the coins in question.
w As the full elucidation of this passage would require a
treatise, I must in the main content myself with references. It
is asberted by Hultsch (Metrohgici Graci, p. 154) that the
author whom Pollux here follows must have lived after the
time of Tiberius, in whose reign the Egyptian tetradrachm,
being much adulterated, passed as a denarius or an Attic drachm,
in which case the statement of the text that the Egyptian talent
was worth only one-quarter of the Attic would hold good. But
jn those times neither Babylonian nor Aeginetan weights were