Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/231

 build on this somewhat crazy foundation an elaborate Aeginetic system of weights and measures intimately related to each other.

We are then probably justified in assuming that Pheidon coined silver at Aegina. The numismatic evidence coincides with the literary authorities. The coins of Aegina are well known, for from first to last the symbol of the sea tortoise ([Greek: chelônê], from which they are called in vulgar parlance tortoises) is found on them. Why Pheidon set up his mint in Aegina instead of in his own city of Argos is not very difficult to understand. Argos was an inland town remote from the highways of commerce, and little in contact with the merchants of the Levant. On the other hand Aegina stood at the portal of central Greece, intercepting the trade of Athens and Corinth; in later days Pericles called it the "eyesore of the Piraeus." It would be probably here that the Greeks first saw the new invention of the East in the hands of the foreign traders, and it would be here, in a great emporium, that the need of a currency would be most felt. In an inland city like Argos or Sparta bars of bronze or iron would serve well for the small commercial transactions of a very primitive society, as we know that the iron currency actually did at Sparta in historical times. E. Curtius suggested (Numism. Chron., 1870) that the tortoise on the Aeginetan coins, which is the symbol of Ashtaroth who was the Phoenician goddess both of the sea and of trade, may be an indication that the mint was set up in the temple of Aphrodite, which overlooked the great harbour of Aegina. Whilst his hypothesis as regards the origin of the tortoise type on the coin is probably wrong, it is quite possible that the coins were first struck in some temple, as we know that the great shrines of the ancient world served as banks and treasuries, as for example the temple of Athena at Athens, that of Apollo at Delphi, and that of Juno Moneta at Rome. The temple priests of Delphi and other rich shrines had at their command large stores of the precious metals, which in the earliest times doubtless were in the shape of small ingots or bullets, such as the gold talents mentioned in the Homeric Poems.

The temple shrines of Delphi and Olympia, Delos and Dodona were centres not merely of religious cult, but likewise of trade