tuous
comparison between the old-fashioned silver currency and " the
new-fangled gold coin," the latter being, the scholiast tells us, the
produce of the statues of Victory in the Acropolis melted down for that
purpose the year before (b.c. 407)
: evidently a desperate expedient of the hard-pushed finance minister.
But this issue, unpopular on many accounts (the poet notes among the
rest its baseness), has totally vanished, leaving not one specimen
behind, sharing the fate of that other contemporaneous expedient, the
issue of a copper coinage, of whose summary repudiation by the
State the same poet's fruitseller so ludicrously complains (Eccles.
817). There are also two or three small gold coins of a very archaic
type ascribed to Thebes, but their paucity added to uncertain origin is
such that their existence does not affect the question.
Philip's
new gold coinage, the first that had appeared in Europe, obtained at
once the most extensive circulation, owing to its purity and the vast
convenience in trade of a representative of value universally received
as perfect in standard and in weight. On these accounts it was
distinguished by the title of the Stater. It is curious to
find how even barbarous nations possessing gold, like the Gauls and
some of the Illyrian chiefs, set about imitating these perfect works
of the medallic art in rude pieces of their own. Philip's gold was
issued almost entirely in the form of didrachms (133 gre. troy),
evidently for the purpose of replacing the old Darie, which was of that
weight. But his successors, the Ptolemies, the wealthiest princes of
antiquity, having the richest commerce of the world superadded to their
own productive gold mines, have perpetuated the memory of their
opulence by the extensive mintage of the ambitious octodrachm, the
quadruple of the stater, averaging 430 grs.
After, however, the wealth of Persia and the tributes oi (μ)
ο
