Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/25

 get a common measure for the ten talents of gold and the seven slave women who formed part of the requital gifts proffered by Agamemnon to Achilles, and can form some notion of the comparative value of the prizes for the chariot race and other contests.

The wider question of Weight-standards in general.

But results far more important than merely the determination of the value of Homeric commodities may be obtained as regards the weight-standards of Europe and their congeners in Asia. For by taking as our primitive unit the cow or ox, we may be able to give a much more simple account of the genesis of those standards than that which hitherto has been the received one.

We have found the Homeric ox and talent identical with the didrachm or stater of the Euboic-Attic standard. All the silver coinage of Greece proper was struck either on this standard or the Aeginetic, and what is still more important for us it was on the Euboic-Attic standard alone that gold was estimated in every part of Greece. Practically the stater of this system was of the same weight as the famous Persian daric which in historical times formed the chief coin-unit of all Asia from India to the Aegean shores.