The numismatic chronicle and journal of the Royal ... - IndianCoins.org

350 NUMISMATIC CHRONICLE.the benefits of commerce were more widely extended byimporting commodities of which there was a deficiency,and exporting those of which there was an excess, theuse of a coinage was an indispensable device. As thenecessaries of Nature were not all easily portable, peopleagreed, for the purposes of barter, mutually to give andreceive some article which, while it was itself a commodity,was practically easy to handle in the business oflife, some such article as iron or silver, which ivas at firstdefined by size and weight (value) ; although they finallywent further, and set a stamp upon every coin to relievethem from the trouble of using the scales, as the stampimpressed upon the coin was an indication of how muchit was worth. Thus it was after the invention of a coinage(not necessarily stamped), as the result of necessarybarter, that . . . Retail Trading came into existence,at firstsimply by equal barter, and afterwards, asexperience progressed, more and more as a scientificmeans of gaining a large profit."We therefore find Aristotle saying that the valuer, orstater, was at first defined simply by both size and weight,but that when the stamp was put on itguaranteeing thecoin, further weighing (or valuing) was unnecessary, asthe stamp was sufficient to show how much it was worth.The stamp does not give its measure of weight, but itsstandard of purity.With this present in our minds, we see in the deben,the stater, and the solidus, the units of barter or priceoriginally determined in amount for the precious metalsby the weighing per capacity of the peculiarquality of metal in which each was expressed.The talent, too, was used by the earlythis way; for the Homeric goldmetal orGreeks intalent is the direct