Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/266

 250 HISTORY OF ART IN ANTIQUITY. ran away with them. Nevertheless, when Herodotus enumerates the presents Croesus consecrated to the Delphic shrine on the eve of his disaster, he doubtless reproduces the figures fur- nished him by local archives. 1 We know now from the inscrip- tions at Delos, those of the Parthenon and of many more sanc- tuaries, with what order and precision the great temples of Greece kept their accounts. It has been computed that Croesus's offerings of massive gold, the weight of which, says the historian, was 117 bricks and i lion, are equivalent to 6448 kilogrammes, or, at the present value of gold, to nearly twenty millions of francs (^800,000). If to this be added all the other objects of un weighed gold and silver mentioned by Herodotus, and we reckon these at only one-half of the above sum, we shall find that the splendid liberality of the Lydian king amounted to nearly one million two hundred pounds sterling. 2 There was, then, an abundance of the precious metals in Lydia, the royal treasury was full to overflowing, and considerable quantities were distributed among private indi- viduals. On the other hand, the great commerce of the country was one of traffic ; it exported products derived from the soil or created by national industry ; it not only imported foreign goods from the old cities of the East, but others manufactured nearer home, upon which Greek genius was beginning to put the stamp of its taste. Similar transactions added daily to the common wealth of the nation, and were facilitated by a metallic reserve far in excess of that of their neighbours, a fact which doubtless suggested to them a notion that had not occurred to their pre- decessors, the industrial peoples of remote antiquity, the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and the Phoenicians themselves. The first step in commerce had everywhere been the barter of one species of goods or produce for another. Thus a monument at Memphis, in Egypt (Fig. 155), shows housewives going to market and purchasing shoes, vegetables, and liquids, which are paid for with fans, glass-beads, and other small objects. Inscrip- tions incised beside the personages render ambiguity as to the meaning of the picture impossible. Exact equivalents cannot be obtained by a similar process, nor is it an easy matter to balance differences when they exist. As soon as commercial transactions expanded, however, as soon as they were carried on not only 1 Herodotus, i. 50, 51. 2 P. DE TCHLATCHEF, Le Bosphore, etc., Svo, pp. 237, 238.