Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/134

 Thus of the four chief metals mentioned in the Homeric Poems, gold alone is subjected to weight. But the scales are used for another purpose still. In the Twelfth Book of the Iliad there is a curious simile wherein a fight between the Trojans and Achaeans is likened to the weighing of wool: "So they held on as an honest, hardworking woman holds the scales, who holding a weight and wool apart lifts them up, making them equal, in order that she may win a humble pittance for her children: thus their fight and war hung evenly until what time Zeus gave masterful glory to Hector, Priam's son ."

Without doubt one of the first uses to which the art of weighing was applied was that of testing the amount of wool given to female slaves, or in this case perhaps to a freed woman, to make sure that they would return all the wool when spun into yarn, and not purloin any portion for themselves. Thus in the older Latin writers we constantly find allusions to the pensum (pendo = to weigh), the portion of wool weighed out to the slave. It is quite possible that in the sale of wool the more ancient conventional fashion of estimating the fleece as worth so much in other familiar commodities long continued for mercantile purposes, the weighing of the wool in small portions being only used as a check on the dishonesty of the spinners. At all events we have found wool estimated by the fleece in mediaeval Ireland, at a time when weights are in common use for the metals.

Such then is the condition of things in the Homeric Poems. Gold is transferred by weight and by weight wool is apportioned out for spinning.

Dr Leaf, in his introduction to Book, when calling attention to various marks of lateness in this book, says: "It has further been remarked with some truth that the numerous similes, though beautiful in themselves, are often disproportionately elaborated and lead up to points which are almost in the nature of an anti-climax." But the use of the word [Greek: alêthês] in an entirely un-Homeric sense seems to make it almost certain that these lines are of late date.]