Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/321

 valued at 4 cows also. From the way in which this notice of her price occurs, it is probable that Achilles did not give a woman of the most ordinary kind as a prize, for had she been the ordinary slave-woman of account, there would have been no need to mention the price, as any one would have known how many cows exactly she was worth. It is then not improbable that three cows were commonly reckoned as the value of a slave, and accordingly the small gold talent, which is the multiple of the ox-unit, is simply the metallic representative of the slave, just as the Homeric Talanton itself is that of the cow.

What the exact weight of this unit was on Greek soil we are now enabled to ascertain by the aid of the treatise on the Constitution of the Athenians known to the ancients as the work of Aristotle, and the brilliant discovery and identification of which by the officials of the British Museum reflects much credit on British scholarship.

We had previously known from Plutarch (who ascribed the first coinage of Athens to Theseus ) that amongst his other reforms Solon caused drachms to be coined of lighter weight than those previously in currency, so that 100 of the new ones would be equal in value to 73 old ones. Some scholars have inferred that this was an expedient for relieving debtors, who would be allowed to pay in the new coin debts contracted in the older currency. The newly discovered Constitution dispels this assumption, and also affords us some most valuable additional matter : "In his Laws then he appears to have made these enactments in favour of the people, but before his legislation he appears to have wrought the cancelling of debts, and afterwards the augmentation of the measures and weights, and the augmentation of the currency. For in his.]]