The origins of Greek coinage are normally sought in a rather unprepossessing dump of ninety-three misshapen pieces of metal found under the foundations of the sixth-century temple of Artemis at Ephesus. Made of electrum - a naturally occurring alloy of gold and silver - the pieces vary in weight from one ninety-sixth of a stater (a stater weighed approximately 7 grams) up to half a stater, though all but two conform to the same weight standard, known as the Milesian standard. The crudest, and presumably earliest, are simply lumps of bullion dropped onto a surface and cooled; some are punched with an incuse square on one side while others exhibit an incuse square on one side and a pattern of striations on the other. The dump also includes the earliest coins, with incuse squares on the reverse and what are known as “types” on the obverse: those with the design of a lion’s head have been associated with Lydia while those that depict a seal (phoke in Greek) have plausibly been identified as being issued by Phocaea, probably representing the earliest known Greek coinage.
It is widely agreed that the Artemision coins predate the first issues of silver coinage on the Greek mainland, though controversy exists as to the dating of the dump. The deposit was clearly sealed by ca. 560 at the latest, when the temple of Artemis was constructed, but scholars differ as to whether the earliest pieces in the dump date to the early sixth century or instead stretch back a further century to ca. 700. Fortunately, the chronology of the earliest mainland series is not entirely dependent on the dating of the Artemision deposit. The “owl” coins of Athens, for example, can be arranged in a relative sequence on the basis of the size and thickness of the flans (the discs on which devices were stamped), the letter forms of the written legend that appears on the coin, the arrangement of the olive sprays on the reverse of the coin, and seriation analysis of coins found in hoards. The earliest coins that display the owl of Athena are not present in hoards that predate ca. 500, suggesting that these coins were first issued in the last quarter of the sixth century. The fact that five coins, belonging to the second series of owl coinage and found in a hoard at Taranto which cannot predate 506, were in mint condition offers welcome confirmation of this dating. On this basis, it is assumed that the very first issue of Athenian coins - the so-called Wappenmunzen, minted with fourteen different obverse designs - was first produced shortly after the middle of the sixth century, during the rule of the Pisistratids. Corinthian coinage probably appeared a little earlier, in the second quarter of the sixth century, while the first “turtles” of Aegina have been dated to ca. 580-570, making this the earliest coinage in mainland Greece (Figure 10.2).
Aristotle (NE 5.5.10) argues that coinage was introduced to serve as a medium or measure for the exchange of commodities. Elsewhere, in the Politics (1.3.13-14), he explicitly associates the invention of coinage with long-distance trade, adding that coins were stamped so as to obviate the necessity of weighing them. Scholars of numismatics, however, have been less convinced that coinage was invented to facilitate trade. One objection that has often been made is that the earliest coins were minted in denominations that were too large for local
Figure 10.2 Silver stater with a turtle. Source: © The Trustees of the British Museum
Market trade and that they are too limited in their distribution to be connected with long-distance trade. As a result, alternative hypotheses have been offered. According to one view, coinage was invented for the standardization of payments to, and expenditures by, the state. The fact that the evidence from the Artemision appears to confirm Herodotus’ belief (1.94.1) that the Lydians were the first to strike coinage might suggest that the motivation was to pay the foreign mercenaries that the Lydian kings employed. Another view sees coinage as originating in bonus payments made for political, military, or judicial service; the practice of stamping types on electrum discs combined a Near Eastern - and earlier Minoan and Mycenaean - tradition of employing seals and personal badges as symbols of authority with the disbursement of gifts of precious metal.
With the discovery of more coin finds, the objections against the trade hypothesis are less compelling than they once were. Firstly, it is becoming increasingly clear that the coinages of some - though by no means all - poleis did include smaller denominations. The “Lydian” coins from the Artemision at Ephesus, the Wappenmunzen and the early coins of Aegina and Corinth were all minted in small denominations and a hoard of 900 coins, probably originating in Colophon and dated 525-500, comprised coins that were minted to either 0.21 grams or 0.42 grams. The coins in this hoard testify to at least 400 different obverse dies and, since a single die could strike anything up to 5,000 coins before being replaced, there must have been a substantial number of coins in circulation in Colophon. The smallest known Athenian coin to date, weighing a mere 0.044 grams, is worth one sixteenth of an obol - that is, one forty-eighth of the standard daily “minimum wage” in fifth-century Athens. On pots dating to the last quarter of the sixth century, prices in obols are scratched on the feet, suggesting that customers of moderate to middling means would use cash to purchase table wares, and the fact that the prices and terms are often abbreviated may indicate a general and widespread familiarity with handling small change. Secondly, it is now known that the early coinages of Corinth and Aegina in particular circulated over a wider area than was previously realized. It is important not to exaggerate this revision but it is also worth noting that, so long as it remains valid currency, there is a natural tendency for coinage to gravitate back towards its issuing authority, meaning that we cannot always infer circulation patterns directly from find spots.
In determining why coinage came to be used in the Archaic Greek world, it is important to separate the invention of coined silver from the invention of money, defined as a medium for establishing value and for making payments. In the Homeric epics, value is measured in terms of oxen. When, in the Iliad, Diomedes and Glaucus recognize the age-old ties of guest friendship that bind their respective families, they decide to exchange gifts, but Zeus, we are told, must have robbed Glaucus of his wits because he exchanged gold armor, worth one hundred oxen, for bronze armor, worth nine (6.235-36). Odysseus’ nursemaid, Eurycleia, had been purchased by Laertes for twenty oxen (Od. 1.431); by contrast, the slave woman offered as second prize at the funeral games of Patroclus was worth only four oxen (Il. 23.705). In early Cretan laws, penalties are assessed in terms of semi-precious metal vessels: thus, in a law dating to the late seventh or early sixth centuries (IC IV.1), fines of five or one hundred cauldrons are stipulated while a sixth-century law (IC IV 8) mentions blood money of one tripod.
In describing the bulky iron currency of Classical Sparta, Plutarch (Lys. 17.5) conjectures that iron and bronze spits had once functioned as an early form of coinage for the Greeks. It is, therefore, interesting that bronze and iron spits have been found in archaeological contexts dating to the Early Iron Age. The earliest examples may be three bronze spits found in a Geometric grave at Palaipaphos-Skales on Cyprus and iron spits found on Crete which date to the tenth century. Considerable numbers of spits were deposited in graves in Argos and dedications are also attested at the Argive Heraion, Perachora, Delphi, Olympia, Nemea, Halieis, Dodona, and the Samian Heraion. The Greek word for spit, obelos, was eventually to designate a unit of currency in many Greek poleis, and six obeloi made up a drachma - literally, “a handful.” It may not be coincidental, then, that spits are often - though not invariably - found in sets of six, twelve, or eighteen, though corrosion and damage make it difficult to know whether they were all produced to a single weight standard. At Athens, in laws that are plausibly ascribed to Solon, fines are levied in drachmas. Plutarch (Sol. 24.1), for example, claims to cite a written Solonian law to the effect that the Archon is to pay one hundred drachmas into the public treasury if he does not pronounce curses on anybody who exports agricultural goods other than olive oil. Since the earliest coinage was not to appear in Athens for another half a century, it is probable that weighed, uncoined silver bullion served as a proto-currency. A similar conclusion holds for Eretria, where a couple of inscriptions (IG XII 9.1273, 1274) refer to penalties of ten staters; the inscription dates to ca. 525, some twenty-five years before the city issued its first coinage.
The evidence, scant as it is, suggests that money itself emerged within the context of the political community rather than to facilitate long-distance trade. Livestock, uncoined bullion, and metal vessels could convert perishable products into storable wealth which could be used to award prizes to athletic victors, to provide daughters with dowries, or to pay fines levied by the state. Coinage, however, is a different matter. The wide range of denominations in which even the earliest issues were struck is a good indicator that coinage subsumed some of the economic functions that had formerly been exercised by uncoined money. That said, it is difficult to dissociate its development from long-distance trade entirely.
What distinguishes coinage from weighed, uncoined bullion is the presence of a stamp. The likeliest explanation for why some authority or authorities decided to stamp the earliest issues of electrum coins is that this guaranteed the value of a metal whose variable gold content was as proverbial as it was impossible to test. As an indication that the issuer would redeem his own coins for the value that he originally declared, the electrum coins found beneath the temple of Artemis at Ephesus can properly be described as a fiduciary currency. At the same time, the variable difference between the real and declared values of these electrum coins inevitably imposed limitations on their circulation and it is not therefore surprising that the numerous types attested at Ephesus tend to remain distributed close to their point of origin. With the realization, however, that the same issuing guarantee could be extended to silver coins, whose purity and therefore value was far less variable, coinage began to circulate more widely from its place of origin and to be accepted more readily as a form of payment by geographically distant economic actors. If it is also true that issuing authorities could sell silver coins for 5 percent more than their face value, then there was an additional incentive for poleis to establish their own mints.
It can hardly be accidental that the earliest mainland Greek coin issues appear in the sixth century when long-distance trade was becoming more specialized and when traders from numerous Greek poleis began to congregate more frequently at the Egyptian emporion of Naucratis where silver was a desirable commodity. Nor can it be accidental that Aegina, whose need to import agricultural products and whose early activity at Naucratis have already been noted, seems to have been the first city of mainland Greece to issue its own coinage. Indeed, the Aeginetan standard was used widely throughout the Aegean, including Delphi, the cities of Boeotia, Sicyon, Argos, Mantinea, Tegea, Andros, Siphnos, Naxos, Tenos, Paros, Thera, Cnidus, Camirus, Lindus, and Sinope. Corinth, whose earliest coinage follows hard on the heels of that of Aegina, was also a state that owed much to commerce (e. g. Thucydides 1.13.5), while it is difficult not to associate the introduction of the Wappenmunzen at Athens with the increasing presence of Athenian black-figure wares and transport amphorae attested overseas (pp. 257-8).
Finally, although the employment of different weight standards throughout the Mediterranean placed some limitations on the circulation of coinage, the sixth century sees the emergence of several “monetary networks,” whereby different cities subscribed to the same weight standard and, sometimes, the same or similar designs. Such networks promoted circulation by lowering transaction costs, but they also served a more sociopolitical function of connecting sometimes distant communities. In the last quarter of the sixth century, the Boeotian cities of Thebes, Tanagra, Hyettus, Acraephnium, Coronea, Mykalessos, and Pharai adopted a common coinage: the reverse of the coins was stamped with the symbol of the individual city but all the obverses carried the characteristic “Boeotian” shield. It has been suggested that the existence of this monetary zone, reinforced by common cult and ethnic sentiment, was foundational for the eventual emergence of the Boeotian federal league, and the argument can easily be extended to Phocis and Arcadia, which were both minting common coinages by the beginning of the fifth century. From the third quarter of the sixth century, the “Achaean” cities of Croton, Sybaris, and Metapontum, later joined by Cau-lonia and Poseidonia, adopted a coinage characterized by the rovescio incuso technique, where the same image - individualized for each city - appears in relief on the obverse and impressed on the reverse, while towards the end of the sixth century, a number of “Ionian” cities in Asia Minor issued a series of electrum staters with ten different obverse types. Although the information is patently anachronistic, it is tempting to wonder whether it is mere coincidence that the Athenian switch from the weight standard of “Dorian” Aegina to that of “Ionian” Euboea should have been attributed to Solon (Aristotle, AC 10.3) - the earliest known author to testify to Athens’ Ionian affiliation (fr. 4a).
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