MONEY OF ATTICA. 



447 



of Athenian gold coin ; he describes the weight and value of the 

 golden Attic stater. The scholiast on the Knights of Aristophanes, 

 although mistaken as to the place whence the Athenians procured the 

 metal, plainly refers to a coinage from gold. 



Notwithstanding there appears to be no reasonable cause for 

 doubting the mere fact of a coinage, yet the quantity of the material 

 applied to this purpose in every sera of the republic was so incon- 

 siderable, as to render the singularity of the practice scarcely less 

 striking, and equally requiring some explanation. De Pauw attempts 

 to elucidate the difficulty in this manner.* 



Herodotus, lib. hi., in enumerating the tributes paid to Darius, 

 makes the relative value of gold to silver as one to thirteen, and 

 Plato in the dialogue entitled Hipparchus, as one to twelve. Now 

 the Athenians, having to purchase their gold in Lydia, would evi- 

 dently be losers in every such bargain ; an Athenian merchant wish- 

 ing to buy fifty pounds weight of gold at Sardes, would necessarily 

 pay for every pound so bought one pound of silver, in addition to the 

 price borne by the same article in his own country ; and consequently 

 could not be repaid without altering materially the nature of the 

 gold. 



We must here observe, that Herodotus is speaking of the relative 

 value of gold to silver in the sixty-seventh olympiad, after the con- 

 quest of Babylon by Darius, and before his invasion of Greece, from 

 which period to the birth of Plato in the eighty-seventh olympiad, 

 there is an interval of eighty years. We cannot suppose that the 

 value of gold at Athens should have been stationary during so long a 

 time ; nor is it credible that the circulation given to the immense 

 quantity of this metal acquired by the plunder of the Persians, 

 should not have operated the smallest change. Of this we may rest 

 assured, that gold, of which there was so little in Greece before the 

 Persian invasion, must necessarily have fallen very considerably in 

 value after that event, and have suffered a diminution from the time 



* Recherches, t. i. 366. 



