Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/153

 with the disturbing question of the relative value of copper and silver, but also of showing that Soutzo's relation of 120 : 1 as that between silver and copper in early Italy must certainly be wrong, and that Mommsen's view is in the main correct. The famous Sicilian poet Epicharmus has left us a line: "Buy me straightway a nice heifer calf for ten nomoi ." As regards the value of the nomos, or nummus ([Greek: nomos] or [Greek: noummos]), Pollux supplies us with some definite information.

In passage ( 87) already quoted he says: "Yet the Sicilian talent was the least in amount, the ancient one, as Aristotle says, weighed four and twenty nummi, but the later one twelve; now the nummus is worth three half obols." These three half obols plainly mean the ordinary half obols of the Attic standard. As the Attic drachm is 67-1/2 grains (normal), 65 grains in actual coins, the 1/6 or obol = 11 grains roughly speaking; three half obols therefore weigh 16-1/2 to 17 grains. Accordingly, if we take the weight of the nummus or litra at 16 to 17 grains of silver, we shall not be wide of the mark. The price then of a good heifer calf was 10 nummi or 160 to 170 grains of silver. The term moschos (calf) is used rather vaguely by various Greek writers, but fortunately by the aid of the Sicilian poet Theocritus, we are certain that it means a calf of the first year not yet weaned; for he speaks of putting the moschos to the cows to suck. From what we have seen (p. 32) of the relative values of cattle of different ages, it is tolerably certain that no full-grown cow would be worth less than six or more than ten calves of the first year. Hence the Sicilian cow, at the end of the sixth century, must have been worth from 960-1020 to 1600-1700 grains of silver. We cannot tell exactly what was the ratio between gold and silver in Sicily or Italy at this time, but as we find it was 14 to 1 in Attica in 440, the probability is that it was not very far from that in Sicily. It certainly must have been at some point between 15 : 1 and 12 : 1. Taking it at 12 : 1, the value of the cow would range from 80 to 141-3/4 grains of gold, whilst in the ratio of 15 : 1 the range is from 64 to 113 grains of.].]