Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/242

 trader went to fairs in Ireland equipped with a pocket balance (which was adjusted for the guinea, half-guinea, sovereign, half-sovereign, and gold seven-shilling-piece).

It is difficult then to see what it would have availed the Aeginetans to have reduced the standard which they are supposed to have got from the Phoenicians.

Their island state was of diminutive proportions; they devoted themselves almost entirely to traffick by sea, their island was an emporium where strangers resorted. In all dealings with the Phoenicians they would have to pay a drawback on their debased coin; for the cunning Phoenician or Ionian was not likely to be beguiled into taking staters of 200 grs. as equivalent to 230 grs. It is plain therefore that when we find divergencies of standard these are not due to mere degradation, but to some far more practical consideration, and this will be seen all the more clearly when we shall find that whilst we have divergencies in silver standards, the gold standard which was in use in Greece from Homeric times down to the Roman Conquest remains almost absolutely without variation. But there are other and stronger objections against the Phoenician origin of the Aeginetic standard.

Now if we accept the doctrine that the Greeks received their coin-standards across the sea from Asia, the Aeginetic from the Phoenician traders whose commerce lay with Aegina and Peloponnesus, the Euboic on the other hand from Lydia by way of the great Ionian cities on the coast of Asia Minor, we become involved in a serious difficulty. At the time represented in the Homeric Poems, there is not as yet a single Greek colony on the coast of Asia Minor. Miletus, destined to be in after years the Queen of Ionia, and to be one of the greatest centres of Hellenic commerce and culture, is as yet known only as the city of the barbarous-speaking Carians. Yet we find the Greeks represented in these self-same poems as already in possession of a standard for gold identical with the light Babylonian or Lydian gold shekel (130 grs.). But again we find from the same source that the Greeks were