Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/385

 MIXED RACES OF INHABITANTS. 369 politically independent. It was in the town, therefore, that the aggregate increase of the colony palpably concentrated itself, property as well as population, private comfort and luxury not less than public force and grandeur. Such growth and improve- ment was of course sustained by the cultivation of the territory, but the evidences of it were manifested in the town; and the large population which we shall have occasion to notice as be- longing to Agrigentum, Sybaris, and other cities, will illustrate this position. There is another point of some importance to mention in re- gard to the Sicilian and Italian cities. The population of the town itself may have been principally, though not wholly, Greek ; but the population of the territory belonging to the town, or of the dependent villages which covered it, must have been in a great measure Sikel or Sikan. The proof of this is found in a cir- cumstance common to ail the Sicilian and Italian Greeks, the peculiarity of their weights, measures, monetary system, and language. The pound and ounce are divisions and denominations belonging altogether to Italy and Sicily, and unknown originally to the Greeks, whose scale consisted of the obolus, the drachma, the miua, and the talent : among the Greeks, too, the metal first and most commonly employed for money was silver, while in Italy and Sicily copper was the primitive metal made use of. Now among all the Italian and Sicilian Greeks, a scale of weight and money arose quite different from that of the Greeks at home, and form- ed by a combination and adjustment of the one of these systems to the other ; it is in many points complex and difficult to under- stand, but in the final result the native system seems to be pre- dominant, and the Grecian system subordinate. 1 Such a couse- 1 Respecting the statical and monetary system, prevalent among the Italian and Sicilian Greeks, see Aristot. Fragment. Trspl IIo/l, ed. Neumann, p. 102; Pollux, iv, 174, ix, 80-S7 ; and above all, Boeckh, Metrologie. eh. xviii, p. 292, and the abstract and review of that work in the Classical Museum, No. 1 ; also, 0. Miiller, Die Etrusker, vol. i, p. 309. The Sicilian Greeks reckoned by talents, each consisting of 1 20 litne or libraj : the JEgiiuean obolus was the equivalent of the litra, having been the value in silver of a pound-weight of copper, at the time when the valuation was taken. The common denominations of money and weight with the exception VOL. ITT. 1C*