Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/105

Rh reverse, but in all probability they do not date earlier than 450 B.C.

Rhoda began to coin about the beginning of the third century B.C., but soon ceased, her rival, Emporiæ, having commenced about the same time, and continued to issue coins down to Roman times. The Phœnicians of the island of Ebusus had learned the art of coining from the Greeks, as had likewise the most ancient Tyrian colony, Gaddir, the Gadeira of the Greeks. The Carthaginians do not appear to have struck money in Spain until the period of the Barcine domination.

The earliest Gaulish coins were imitations of the coins of Massalia and Rhoda. As Massalia commanded the Rhone, so we find her coins and their imitations all up the valley of the Rhone, into Helvetia, while they likewise formed the currency of Northern Italy until the Roman conquest of that region. This early coinage was entirely of silver. Sometime about 250 B.C., the powerful people of the Arverni, who had great wealth in gold, commenced a gold coinage imitated from the gold staters of Philip of Macedon, which had a head of Apollo in the obverse and a biga on the reverse. This type gradually spread northwards, becoming more barbarous as it passed from one tribe to another, until at last it crosses into Britain and became the type of the great majority of the British coins. It is obvious that if we find the imitations of the Greek cities of Massalia, Emporiæ, and Rhoda lying along in certain geographical area, and those of the Philippus type lying along another, the former must have been the first to come under Greek influence.

I shall now enumerate the chief Gaulish types, with the people who struck them, at the same time indicating the Greek original. A glance at the map will show that the earlier lie in the western, the later in the northern region. The coins of Emporiæ exhibit a great variety of types (A. Heiss, Les Monnaies antiques de l’Espagne, p. 93 ; Head, Historia Numorum, p. 1). On some we find a horse