AND TRADERS 67 
The third reason was due to nearly all ordinary trade 
being effected by barter. Payment was in kine, kind, or 
service. The ox, probably because all round the most 
important of possessions, constituted the ordinary measure of 
value: thus a female slave skilled in embroidery fetches four 
oxen. Laertes gives twenty for Eurycleia, while much-wooed 
maidens by gifts from their successful suitors “ multiply 
oxen ”’ for their fathers. 
Mentes sails to Temesa with a cargo of “ shining iron’”’ to 
exchange for copper.! Then again in J/., VII. 472 ff., “ the 
flowing-haired Achzans bought them wine thence, some for 
bronze and some for gleaming iron, and some with hides, 
and some with whole kine, and some with captives.”” Among 
the fishermen of the Indian Ocean, fish-hooks, on the same 
principle of importance of possession, ‘‘ the most important 
to them of all implements, passed as currency and in 
time became a true money Jarin, just as did the hoe in 
China.” 2 
“The talents of gold,’ 3 probably Babylonian shekels, 
whether Hultsch’s heavy or W. Ridgeway’s light one, implied, 
according to some, a money standard of value. But wrongly, 
because neither gold nor silver came to coinage in Greece or 
anywhere else till long after Homer’s day. 
Fishermen seem slowly to have acquired some sort of 
status. ‘AAcéc, at first meaning a seaman or one connected 
with the sea, in time denoted also a fisherman. Od., XIX. 111, 
characterises the well-ordered realm of a “ blameless king ’”’ 
as one, in which “‘ the black earth bears wheat and barley, 
and trees are laden with fruit, and sheep bring forth and fail 
not, and the sea gives store of fish.”’ 
Any objection that such a kingdom had no actual existence, 
but was only invented to heighten the hyperbole of laudation 
of Penelope’s fame, ‘‘ which goes up to the wide heaven, as doth 
the fame of a blameless king,’’ concerns us not at all, for the 
kingdom whether actual or imaginary is held up as worthy of 
1 Od., I. 182 ff. 
2 W. Ridgeway, The Origin of Metallic Currency (Cambridge, 1892), 27 ff. 
3 fl,, XXIII. 269. 
