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Why did the Ancient Greeks strike coins? John Melville-Jones Why the ancient Greeks struck coins Colin Kraay, came to the conclusion that is not as simple a question as it seems. In coinage was not invented just to support fact, it contains within it several different either internal or external trade but to questions with different answers. The first facilitate the management of such things way in which we may approach it is to ask: as the payment of harbour dues, fines, the ‘Who struck the earliest Greek coins, and employment of experts from outside the why were these coins issued?’ citizen body, the undertaking of large scale Early numismatists were content with building projects which required payment pointing to the descriptions of the nature for labour and materials, and the hiring of of coinage that had been given by Plato mercenary soldiers.2 and Aristotle and they made assumptions Another more recent investigation of which were to a great extent based on the this question was made by CJ Howgego situation that existed in their own times. in 1990.3 In the last few years, books on They did not address the question of the the nature of early Greek coinage have exact place and circumstances in which also been published by David Schaps and coinage came into being, but rather the Richard Seaford and collections of essays theoretical advantages which were gained have been edited by Miriam Balmuth, from its introduction, and if they tried to and by Andrew Meadows and Kirsty locate this event they leaned on a passage Shipton.4 from the Histories of Herodotus, which is If these recent studies have anything quoted below, and gave the credit to the in common, it is that they all move in Lydians. the direction of recognising that coinage In recent years more basic questions is only one form of money; that before have been asked and more varied answers the introduction of coinage many other have been suggested. Two major studies forms of transaction existed, and that after should be mentioned. The first is an coinage had come into use in some places article which was published in 1964 in the other forms of money continued to be Journal of Hellenic Studies.1 I remember employed. Coinage was therefore struck it very clearly because I had just begun to when circumstances made it necessary study ancient Greek coinage and this most or useful to do so, rather than because it thought-provoking study made many of was the only way of facilitating trade and the things that I had been reading obsolete employment. or at least obsolescent. The article was Against this background, what is the entitled ‘Hoards, Small Change and the evidence for the ‘invention of coinage’ or, Origin of Coinage’. Its author, the late to be more precise, the addition of coinage JNAA 17 2006 21 John Melville-Jones to other forms of money in the ancient that he touched into gold. Erichthonius Greek world? In the first place we may and Lycus of Athens belong to the misty examine the written statements of ancient period before anything that we might Greek writers, although none of them call historical can be documented and, if was contemporary with this event. The they existed, they lived long before the answers that are provided by these ancient development of coinage. The historian written sources are varied. For example, Aglaosthenes was a Naxian, so it is not coinage was attributed to a number of surprising that he should have claimed the different people in a statement made by invention of coinage for his own island. one writer, Julius Pollux, who approaches But this is a bad guess. The earliest known the question directly. Pollux lived and coins of Naxos are of the last quarter of wrote at Alexandria in the second century the sixth century BC, about a century after AD, long after coinage had begun to be the time when we believe that coins began used, and what he wrote is a collection of to be produced in Asia Minor, and were rumours. He asked (Onomasticon IX, 83): struck in silver, not in electrum which …whether Pheidon of Argos was the was the metal used for the earliest coins. first to strike coins, or Demodice of The Lydians are the only group in this list Cyme, wife of the Phrygian Midas and who might be thought worthy of a second daughter of Agamemnon king of Cyme, glance. or the Athenians Erichthonius and Lycus, The Phoenicians, whose main base was or the Lydians, as Xenophanes says, in what we should nowadays call Lebanon or the Naxians, which is the opinion of and Syria, and who operated trading Aglaosthenes… establishments around the Mediterranean, Of these, Pheidon of Argos (a shadowy were also suggested as possible originators figure whose date is disputed) is also of coinage. A work entitled Odysseus, mentioned by the ancient Greek historian which is ascribed to the fourth century BC Ephorus, who says that he struck coins rhetorician and sophist Alcidamas, contains on the island of Aegina, a statement this statement (26–7): which is at first hard to understand, Did not the Phoenicians, the most because there is no reason to suppose that learned and intelligent of foreign nations, Pheidon had political control over Aegina. discover coinage? For they divided up an It is, however, possible to interpret the equal portion of beaten metal, and set a statement satisfactorily if we understand stamp upon it according to whether it had it as an attempt to reconcile the known a greater or lesser weight. fact that European silver coinage was first Again, this is a bad guess, although it is produced on that island with the tradition not illogical, since the Phoenicians were the that claims that Pheidon, the ruler of Argos, major trading nation in the Mediterranean had reorganised the system of weights and until their bases were conquered by measures that was used in the area under Alexander the Great and the Romans. But his control. The choice of Demodice and the earliest coinage that we can attribute to Midas is probably inspired simply by any Phoenician group belongs to the fifth the myth that Midas turned everything century BC, long after the introduction of 22 JNAA 17 2006 Why did the Ancient Greeks strike coins? coinage elsewhere; and it must be assumed and based on agriculture and the pasturing that until and even after that time their of animals, rather than on commercial trade was conducted by barter rather than activities. There is no reason why coinage by the use of coined money. should have been invented by them for the The statement which has generally sake of any internal activity. received the greatest prominence in modern There is, however, one major reason books was made by Herodotus, who wrote which might have led to the production (Histories, I, 94): of coins for, and perhaps by, the Lydians, The Lydians...have approximately the whether they actually invented it or not. same customs as the Greeks, except that This is (as Kraay saw) the employment of they prostitute their female children; mercenary soldiers, who would have had and they were the first people of whom to be paid at the end of their service with we have knowledge who struck and used something that was of high worth, easily coinage of gold and silver, and were the portable and made up of units which were first who became retailers. clearly of the same value, so that each The obvious way in which we can soldier could see that he was receiving interpret these words is as a clear statement: his fair share. Here a fragment (partially that the Lydians, a non-Greek people living preserved on a scrap of papyrus) of a lost in the interior of Asia Minor, were the poem composed by the poet Alcaeus of inventors of coinage. But there are two Lesbos may be relevant: difficulties in this interpretation: in the first O Father Zeus, the Lydians angry at place, the earliest coins were not made what has happened, have given us two of gold and silver, but in an alloy of the thousand staters, if we can enter the two metals. We call this electrum, as the ?holy city...5 Romans did, but the Greeks called electrum Alcaeus was probably active from ‘gold’, because this is what it was to them, c.610 BC, and this fragment of a poem, simply one form of gold as opposed to which mentions ‘staters’, is perhaps the pure gold (it was sometimes called ‘white earliest surviving reference to coinage. The gold’ because of its paler colour). The word ‘stater’ in this context seems to mean Lydians were, however, definitely the first the standard major unit of coinage, as it to produce coins in pure gold as well as in did later in this area. The context suggests pure silver. We may guess therefore that that the Lydians are paying Greeks to when Herodotus composed this sentence, attack a city. An incomplete word at the he (or the source that he was copying) was end of the third line may, as the editors thinking of the pure gold and silver coinage suggest, be completed to read ‘holy’ (as which began to be issued more than half in the translation printed above), a word a century after the first electrum coins sometimes used at this time to describe appeared. cities; on the other hand, it may be the The second difficulty that we have in beginning of the name of a city, Hiera or attributing the invention of coinage to the Hira, which we are told was one of the Lydians is that their society was a monarchy, cities on the island of Lesbos, the home ruled by a king supported by an aristocracy, of Alcaeus.