Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/19

 *rency; consequently the estimation of values by the cow is older than that by means of a Talent or "weight" of gold, or silver or copper. Again, in Homer, all values are expressed in so many oxen, as "golden arms for brazen, those worth one hundred beeves, for those worth nine beeves " (Il. 236).

The Talent on the other hand is only mentioned in Homer in relation to gold (for we never find any mention of a Talent of silver) and we never find the value of any other article expressed in Talents. But the names of monetary units hold their ground long after they themselves have ceased to be in actual use as we observe in such common expressions as "bet a guinea," or worth a "groat," although these coins themselves are no longer in circulation, and so the French sou has survived for a century in popular parlance, and the Thaler has lived into the new German monetary system. Accordingly we may infer that the method of expressing the value of commodities in kine, which we find side by side with the Talent, is the elder of the twain.

Was there any immediate connection between the two systems or were they as Hultsch (Metrologie, p. 165) maintains entirely independent? It is difficult to conceive any people, however primitive, employing two standards at the same time which are completely independent of each other. For instance when we find in the Iliad[2] that in a list of three prizes appointed for the foot-race, the second is a cow, the third is a half-talent of gold, it is impossible to believe that Achilles or rather the poet had not some clear idea concerning the relative value of an ox and a talent. Now it is noteworthy that, as already remarked, nowhere in the Poems is the value of any commodity expressed in Talents; yet who can doubt that Talents of gold passed freely as media of exchange? A simple solution of this difficulty would be that the Talent of gold represented the older ox-unit. This would account for the fact that all values are expressed in oxen, and not in Talents, the older name prevailing in a fashion resembling the usage of pecunia in Latin.

A complete parallel for such a practice can be still found at the present moment among some of the Samoyede tribes]