Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/47

 hides, raw copper and pig iron stand beside the cow as multiples or sub-multiples. When Ajax and Idomeneus make a bet on the issue of the chariot race, the proposed wager is a pot or a kettle, whilst from another passage we learn that the usual prizes given at the funeral games of a chieftain were female slaves and pots (Tripods).

Passing from Greece into Italy we have no difficulty in proving that the cow was the regular unit of value in that peninsula and the adjacent island of Sicily. Down to 451 all fines at Rome were paid in cows and sheep. By the Tarpeian Law these were commuted for payments in copper, each cow being set at 100 asses, each sheep at 10 asses. As I shall deal with the whole question of the Roman As at considerable length later on I shall here simply note that the Italian tribes had evidently the same system of adjusting the relations between their cattle and sheep and their metals which we found among the Persians and modern Ossetes. In Sicily it is clear that the cow had played the same part as elsewhere, for we learn from Aristotle that when the tyrant Dionysius burdened the Syracusans by excessive taxation, they ceased in a great degree to keep cattle, inasmuch as the unit of assessment was the cow. If then in the 4th century at Syracuse, the most advanced community in Sicily, the cow still continued to be the unit of assessment, à fortiori, at an earlier period that animal must have been the monetary unit of the whole island. From the Italians we pass on to their close kinsmen the Kelts. We are told by Polybius that when the Gauls entered Italy, their wealth consisted of their cattle and gold ornaments, but although an argument will be offered below to show that the cow was the monetary unit of both Gauls and Germans, we have no definite evidence respecting the barter system. But fortunately the Ancient Laws of Wales and Ireland afford us ample insight into the Keltic system. Irish tradition goes back far beyond the date at which the Brehon Laws were compiled, and from it we get a glimpse of a system almost Homeric: thus we read in the Annals of the Four Masters