Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- List of text-figures
- List of chronological tables
- Preface
- PART I THE PERSIAN EMPIRE
- PART II THE GREEK STATES
- 4 The tyranny of the Pisistratidae
- 5 The reform of the Athenian state by Cleisthenes
- 6 Greece before the Persian invasion
- 7 Archaic Greek society
- 7a Religion and the state
- 7b The development of ideas, 750 to 500 B.C.
- 7c Material culture
- 7d Coinage
- 7e Trade
- 8 The Ionian Revolt
- 9 The expedition of Datis and Artaphernes
- 10 The expedition of Xerxes
- 11 The liberation of Greece
- PART III THE WEST
- BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Index
- Map 1. The Achaemenid empire
- Map 6. Central Asia
- Map 9. The Black Sea area
- Map 11. Egypt
- Map 13. Greek and Phoenician trade in the period of the Persian Wars
- Map 15. Greece and the Aegean
- Map 18. Northern and Central Italy
- Map 19. Central and Southern Italy
- References
7d - Coinage
from 7 - Archaic Greek society
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- List of text-figures
- List of chronological tables
- Preface
- PART I THE PERSIAN EMPIRE
- PART II THE GREEK STATES
- 4 The tyranny of the Pisistratidae
- 5 The reform of the Athenian state by Cleisthenes
- 6 Greece before the Persian invasion
- 7 Archaic Greek society
- 7a Religion and the state
- 7b The development of ideas, 750 to 500 B.C.
- 7c Material culture
- 7d Coinage
- 7e Trade
- 8 The Ionian Revolt
- 9 The expedition of Datis and Artaphernes
- 10 The expedition of Xerxes
- 11 The liberation of Greece
- PART III THE WEST
- BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Index
- Map 1. The Achaemenid empire
- Map 6. Central Asia
- Map 9. The Black Sea area
- Map 11. Egypt
- Map 13. Greek and Phoenician trade in the period of the Persian Wars
- Map 15. Greece and the Aegean
- Map 18. Northern and Central Italy
- Map 19. Central and Southern Italy
- References
Summary
Among the peoples living around or in touch with the Mediterranean basin, it was certainly the Greeks who, stimulated by certain Near Eastern practices, made coinage an institution peculiarly their own, for their non-Greek neighbours – the Etruscans, the Sicels, the Carthaginians, the Phoenicians, the Egyptians – despite preoccupations with trade, adopted coinage in frank imitation of the Greeks only at comparatively late dates. Yet the Greeks themselves do not seem to have regarded the development or, as they would have called it, the invention of coinage as marking either the beginning of a new era of commercial practice, or as the discovery of a new and more conveniently liquid medium in which to store surplus wealth. If they did see it in this way, remarkably little echo of it has come down to us in the literature of the period. The growth of wealth during the seventh and sixth centuries and its evil social and political consequences did indeed receive much comment in the writings of Theognis and Solon and others, but hardly any specific mention is made in this connexion of wealth in the peculiarly concentrated, tangible and portable form of coinage. Herodotus tells the story of the Lydian Pythius who claimed to possess, as explicitly surplus wealth, nearly four million gold Darics (VII.27–9); though the story is dated little more than a generation after the initiation of the Persian imperial coinage by Darius, it is only the scale of his wealth that is seen as remarkable, not the fact that so much was held in coin.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Ancient History , pp. 431 - 445Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1988