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Bactrian Gold Treasure from Afghanistan, coming soon....
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Aurum, Gold

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AURUM.
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silver (800,000 l.), the whole of which went to pay his mercenary-troops. The donaria in silver which they melted down amounted to 60,000 talents. When all was spent they set to work to dig up the floor of the temple in search of hidden treasure, but were made to desist by an earthquake. The sums thus sacrilegiously obtained equalled the whole of the Persian treasure afterwards captured by Alexander. By a more wanton sacrilege one gave his wife Erephyle's famous necklace, dedicated by Alcmaeon; the other Helen's, the offering of Menelaus. The ladies drew lots for the choice : the proud and sulky one got the first, the beautiful and loose one Helen's (Ath. vi. 231).
As there exist no coins of these tyrants (or rather patriots), or even of the state, in gold (and of that enormous amount of the metal some, if minted, would certainly have escaped the recoinage of the victors), it follows necessarily that they put the treasure into circulation in the form of small ingots,that, as tra-
dition tells, primitive style of Hellenic currency, or the earliest money of the Hindoos, bits of silver shaped like our dominoes, and having a punch-mark on one side only. We may be sure that Philip brought in a heavy bill of expenses to his employers, and that the bulk of the captured treasure found its way into his coffers.
His gold coinage must have been upon an enormous scale, considering the shortness of the period over which it extended, for even now his staters are as plentiful as those of his son, who had all the millions of the Persian darics to supply his mints. Similarly the gold pieces of Lysimachus, the next master of Thrace, are equally abundant, and testify to the continued pro­ductiveness of those mines. A recent visitor to that district informs me that the neighbourhood of Philippi is covered with vast mounds of refuse thrown up from the workings, which appeared to him much too recent to date from the times of the Macedonians : yet there cannot be found any record of the mines having been reopened by the Byzantines.
Of Athens the few genuine gold pieces known are evidently copied from those of Philip, and in all probability were issued when the city was in the hands of Archelaus, the lieutenant of Mithridates. There are also two or three small gold coins of a
Aurum, Gold Page of 453 Aurum, Gold
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