Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/230

 measures (at Athens) were made larger than those of Pheidon" (c. 10) . Although the writer refers to the Aeginetic coin-*weights in the next clause, he does not refer to them as the Pheidonian.

Now let us pass on to a remarkable passage in the ''Etymologicum Magnum (s. v.'' [Greek: Obeliskos]).

"First of all men Pheidon of Argos struck money in Aegina; and having given them (his subjects) coin and abolished the spits, he dedicated them to Hera in Argos. But since at that time the spits used to fill the hand, that is the grasp, we, although we do not fill our hand with the six obols (spits) call it a grasp full ([Greek: drachmê]) owing to the grasping of them. Whence even still to this day we call the usurer the spit-weigher, since by weights the men of old used to hand (money) over ." The writer of this passage evidently regards Pheidon as the first inventor of the art of coining but not of weight standards.

Finally the Parian Marble recounts that, "Pheidon the Argive confiscated the measures and remade them and made silver coin in Aegina ." Such then is the body of evidence which we possess, all pointing to Aegina as the first place in Greece which saw a mint set up, and to Pheidon of Argos as the first to establish that mint. As we have pointed out above we have nothing but a very dubious statement of Strabo (which is coupled with another most certainly wrong, i.e., that Pheidon was the inventor of every other kind of money as well as silver) as regards the invention of weights by Pheidon, although from the passage in Herodotus already quoted, metrologists one after another have assumed that the measures ([Greek: metra]) meant a metric system in the modern sense, and have not hesitated to](l. 30).]