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Aurum, Gold

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106                                        AURUM.
pieces. In return for this liberality Hiero sent him back a shipload of corn and many other presents.
It is therefore to be concluded that at this time the Thasian mines were still in the hands of the Phoenicians,1' who trans­mitted all their produce to Tyre. When, however, Philip had made himself master of the mines in Thrace, at Crenides and Scapte-Hyle, places under Mount Pangeeus, that had belonged to the Thasians when Herodotus visited that island, he changed the name to Philippi, and prosecuted the works with great vigour and proportionate success, as appears from the extensive coinage of gold, which he was the first of the Greeks to put into circulation. These mines brought him in 1000 talents or 60,000 pounds weight of gold every year. They continued to be worked down to the end of the Macedonian kingdom. In the beginning of the reign of Perseus, Polybius notices that Abro-batis, a Thracian king, had got possession of them, but the Romans speedily expelled him. The first act of the latter on their conquest of Macedonia was to stop the works, only allowing the copper and the iron (Liv. xiv. 29). Inasmuch as this act is classed amongst their other favours to the vanquished, such as the grant of freedom, the reduction of the taxes to one-half, it would seem that the later kings had carried on their mining operations by means of forced labour.
To return to Philip : the metal for his coinage, besides the produce of these mines, doubtless represents much of those treasures of Delphi seen by Herodotus, but melted down by the tyrants Philomelus and his brothers to defray the expenses of the ten years' war they waged against the Amphictyons, whose general Philip was.
Diodorus (xvi. 56) states that Phayllus coined into money the 120 ingots presented by Croesus, each ingot weighing two talents (120 lbs.), as well as 360 bowls of two minae each (2 lbs.) : also the woman and the lion in gold, weighing together thirty talents. All this gold amounted in value to 4000 talents of
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