MONEY IN ANCIENT GREECE
coins for Ptolemy II and Ptolemy III The first coins appeared in Lydia, a small kingdom in Asia Minor, around 600 B.C. Coinage was introduced to Asia Minor by the Lydians and was used by several Greek city-states on Asia Minor within a few decades after it first appeared. The Greeks made coins of various denomination in unalloyed gold and silver and the stamped them with images of gods and goddesses.
Coins were the primary means of exchange (paper money was first used by the Mongols and the Chinese around A.D.1000). Coins were usually made by striking the smooth gold and silver blanks between engraved dies of bronze or hardened iron. The die for one side usually contained the face of a ruler. The other die was for the back of the coin. Molds were only rarely used.
Talents and drachmas were the names of the ancient Greek currency. One talent equaled 6000 drachmas. By one estimate a drachma was worth about $2.00 in present-day money. By another estimate it was worth about half a cent. The cost of sending a letter was around 2 talents and 300 drachmas. In most reckonings talents were a lot of money. A single talent could pay a month’s wages for a 170 oarsmen on a Greek warship. The cost of the Parthenon in Athens was estimated to worth 340 to 800 silver talents.
In addition to being legal tender, coins were also regarded as works of art and forums for political views. Every city state struck its own coins, usually from silver, and their designs changed constantly to commemorate victories or rulers. The figures on these coins conveyed emotion, sereneness and strength and some their makers considered them be such works of art the coins were signed.
Candida Moss wrote in the Daily Beast: In the ancient world, coins were minted by hand and, as such, every coin was unique. This made the practical task of identifying counterfeit money that much more difficult. As a result people had to examine their coins and decipher their imagery. This made coins a key means by which propaganda was disseminated, key events were valorized, and leaders touted. [Source: Candida Moss, Daily Beast, July 7, 2018]
Origin of Coinage in Ancient Greece
The earliest coins were rough lumps of metal with striations on the reverse made by the roughened surface of a punch. In the process of manufacture a flat blank of metal was placed red hot on a die, a punch was then held upon the reverse of the blank, and struck with a hammer. As no “collar” was employed, the metal of course spread at the edges, making the coin only roughly circular. With the advance of art the coin types received the attention of the best artists and craftsmen, and in consequence the value of Greek coins, both as original works of art and as historical documents, cannot be exaggerated. [Source: “The Daily Life of the Greeks and Romans”, Helen McClees Ph.D, Gilliss Press, 1924]
coins for Ptolemy II and Ptolemy III Throughout history and throughout the world all sorts of things have been used for money… beads, shells, salt, amber, cocoa beans, jade, ivory, copper, silver, gold, pigs, oxen, feathers, tobacco and so on. Some of these were selected for portability, some for their decorative appeal, and others for their immediate availability as food. What all had in common is that, for some period of time, they were recognized by the society in which they were used as an acceptable medium of exchange and as a means of paying debt. [Source: Canadian Museum of History |]
There were various occasions in the lives of the early Greeks when they were called upon to make payments. Perhaps someone in the family had deliberately or accidentally (it made no difference!) killed another person. In lieu of killing the offender, arrangements were frequently made to accept an appropriate payment as an alternative- hence the term “blood money ”. Possibly a father had agreed (occasionally with her consent) to provide his daughter's hand in marriage to a prospective husband. Naturally she was expected to come with an adequate dowry, and one she was entitled to get back with interest should the marriage not work out. (In earlier times, the dowry arrangements were reversed. Originally, it was a payment made to the father of the bride by the prospective groom in compensation for the loss of the daughter's services. But times change!) There were also taxes to be paid, tribute that was expected, the need to fulfill religious obligations, opportunities to trade with foreign merchants – all demands which could be easily satisfied via a portable and widely-accepted currency. |
Lydian Coins: the World's First Money
The worlds' first money, scholars say, was circulated in the 7th century B.C. by the Lydians.. According to Herodotus, the Lydians — who lived in Lydia, which was located adjacent to Ionia in Western Asia Minor in resent day Turkey — began using silver and gold coinage around 650 B.C. The thumb-nail-size coins were struck from lumps of electrum, a pale yellow alloy of gold and silver, that had washed down streams from nearby limestone mountains. The late Oxford scholar Colin Kray surmised that the Lydian government found the coins useful as a standard medium of exchange and merchants liked them because they didn't have to do a lot of weighing and measuring. [Source: Peter White, National Geographic, January 1993]
Lydian gold coin of Croesus
The Lydian “coins” were marked small lumps of electrum with consistence weights. Some scholars insist that spade money was made by Zhou dynasty in China in 770 B.C. is the world's oldest money. What made the Lydian currency different was the fact it had inscriptions. Some coins had portraits of Lydian King Gyges. These have been found as far east as Sicily. Others were struck in denominations as small as .006 of an ounce (1/50th the weight of a penny). Electrum was panned from local riverbeds.
First unearthed at the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Lydian coins had many of the same features of modern coins: they were made of a precious metal, the were a specific measured size and they were stamped with images of rulers, animals and mythical beasts. Some think Lydians developed the scheme to pay mercenary soldiers.
Problems with Early Lydian Coins
The first generation of coins produced by the Lydians was made of electrum, a naturally-occurring pale yellow alloy of gold and silver, commonly called white gold. These were not perfectly circular like today's coins. In fact, they looked somewhat like squashed kidney beans or flat pebbles with a stamped design on one side. (If you want to get a good approximation of the size and shape of early coins, make a short rope out of plasticene or putty and squeeze it between your thumb and forefinger. What you will be left with is a piece of material indented in the middle with irregular edges, thicker in some places than others. This made the coins difficult to stack. [Source: Canadian Museum of History |]
Also, because the shapes and thickness of the coins varied it wasn't long before some enterprising cheaters began to shave bits off the thicker parts of the coins. The minters responded by putting extensive designs on the coins and by impressing a raised circle around the rim. These only remotely resembled the handsome coins that eventually would be distributed by any Greek city-state of significant size, the coins proudly bearing the city's emblem on one side and, perhaps, the head of its patron god or goddess on the other. It is enlightening to look at the evolution of coin production.
“The early coin producer would take a valuable metal (gold, silver, copper), weigh out the appropriate amount for the coin he was minting, heat the metal until it was malleable enough to fit into an iron or bronze mold (die) and then hit the metal with a hammer to flatten it out. What resulted was a flattish, irregularly shaped object that could be used as money. Later minters or coin producers improved upon the process, engraving images in the die that could be transferred to the coin and, eventually, adding a second engraved die so images could be impressed unto the two sides of the coin with the same strike of the hammer. |
Lydian coin
Development of Greek Coinage
The idea of coinage was popular that it was adopted by several Greek city-states only a few decades after the first coins appeared in Lydia. From Lydia, coinage spread throughout the Greek realm and soon cities such as Aegina, Corinth, Rhodes and Athens were minting their own coins, according to their own standards.The Greeks made coins of various denominations in unalloyed gold and silver and the stamped them with images of gods and goddesses.
The ever-competitive Greek city-states then did with coinage what they did in so many other cases. They improved it by adding beauty, minting coins during the 5th Century B.C. that have often been described as the most beautiful coins ever made. It was the Greek sense of aesthetics at work. Cities vied with each other to produce quality coinage that proudly carried imagery representative of the city far beyond its borders…the owl of Athens, the turtle of Aegina, the Pegasus of Corinth. The best instrument of propaganda until the invention of the printing press was probably the coin. [Source: Canadian Museum of History |]
Sparta , which always seemed to be the exception to the standard Greek way of doing things, lived up to her reputation. As a society, they had concluded that the accumulation of wealth was not a Spartan value. But there was a need to pay debt among themselves, so they went with the iron spit (a slender, pointed iron rod used to hold meat over the fire) as their unit of currency. Prior to the introduction of coinage virtually all of Greece used these 3 ft (1m) lengths of iron as currency but Sparta was the only state to continue that usage while other states were using more precious metals. The cooking spit, which was about 3 ft. (1m) long, did have a long history as a unit of currency dating back to Homer. In fact the drachma coin seems to have derived its name from drax which means “handful” referring to the half-dozen iron spits one could hold in one hand. |
Ancient Greek Coins
The names of a couple of dozen coins are known and examples exist. Why they survived and were not melted down for their metal content is the result of where ancient Greeks tended to store their wealth- buried in the ground. A number of these hoards have been unearthed in modern times. Some of the more common denominations were as follows:
Obol = the smallest silver coin, equal to one cooking spit
6 obols = made up a drachma
1 stater = equaled two ( or sometimes three) drachmas
100 drachmas = 1 mina
60 minas = 1 talent
12 chalkoi = 1 obol (The chalkoi were made of copper.)
[Source: Canadian Museum of History ]
Alexander the Great gold coin
It is difficult to make a comparison between our currency today and the currency of ancient Greece. According to the historian Donald Kagan (The Peloponnesian War, page 61) one talent was the cost to build one warship of the trireme class. It was also the cost of paying the crew of that warship for a month (approximately 200 bodies). The published accounts of the Parthenon construction project (which were engraved in stone and put out in the agora for everyone to see) said the temple cost 469 talents. (A talent represented 57 lb (26 kg.) of silver. An ordinary clay pot sold for one obol. A labourer working at the time of Pericles could expect to earn 2-3 obols per day while an artisan or specialized tradesman such as a stonemason earned twice that. One could buy an upper-middle-class house for about 3000 drachmas or ½ talent. Then, as now, people in the entertainment business made disproportionately more than anyone else. The famous 4th Century actor Polus is reputed to have received one talent for only two performances. |
“Usually Greeks carried coins in their mouths since their clothing lacked pockets. When someone died they were buried with a couple of coins in their mouth to pay the ferryman Charon their passage across the river Styx to the underworld.
Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons, The Louvre, The British Museum
Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Greece sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Hellenistic World sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; BBC Ancient Greeks bbc.co.uk/history/; Canadian Museum of History, Perseus Project - Tufts University; perseus.tufts.edu ; MIT Classics Online classics.mit.edu ; Gutenberg.org, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, Live Science, Discover magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, Encyclopædia Britannica, Wikipedia, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP and various books and other publications.
Last updated September 2024