The Myth of Midas’ Golden Touch

Over two thousand years ago there lived one of the richest men on earth-a king whose name was Midas. Midas love gold more than anything in the world except, of course, his young, blue-eyed, golden-haired daughter. Even when he walked among his rose trees in his garden, he wish he could turn all the roses into gold.

2014

Ovid's story on King Midas and the Golden Touch is presented in the Latin original with an interlinear translation and a running commentary, which may serve as a teacher's guide for a Latin translation class.

Ancient History: Resources for Teachers 2012: 248-257.

Archaic Athenian Coinage

Historia 63/3 (2014), 257-77

Silver mining helped transform Athens from a quiet backwater ca. 600 BCE to a dominant regional and naval power a little over a century later, but despite having large argentiferous ore deposits and being an early minter, she did not initially use much native silver for her coinage. In this paper I identify technical and geopolitical factors which explain this. I also explore the related and controversial questions of the extent to which the Athenian State benefited from the massive exploitation of the Laurion deposits, and the nexus between silver mining, monetisation of the economy, and political development.

Oxford, 1918

PLATES I-XL * E. Speck (1905) devotes a volume of his JIanddsgeschichte des AUeriums to Greece ; and his work is of value. Of course, there are many smaller works and monographs which throw light on particular fields of ancient commerce. An excellent book, though now somewhat out of date, is Buchsenschiitz, Besitz und Erwerh im griech. Altertum, 1869. It is to be regretted that Mr. A. E. Zimmern, in his recent work on the Greek Commonwealths y has, in the chapters devoted to commerce, frequently followed untrustworthy modern authorities who put theories in the place of facts. Ifl67 B 2 See especially W. Leaf, Troy, a study in Homeric geography ; V. Berard Les PMniciens et VOdysRee. * A great part of this and the foUowiug two sections is repeated from Gardner and Jevons, Manual of Greek AntiquiiieSj pp. 886 and foil., with the permission of the publishers. ' II xxiii. 835. * Jl, vii, 474. GEEEK TEADE-EOUTES 3 Phoenicians came most of the articles of manufacture and luxury used by the Greeks of that age. Vases for unguents and vessels of bronze, and clothes dyed with purple, the skilful Sidonians manufactured themselves ; ivory they brought Taking Athens, Aegina, and Corinth as the centre, we find radiating from it four principal courses of trade. The first led in a north-easterly direction past the coasts of Greeks of Hellas brought in return for the products of the soil wine, pottery, and articles of manufacture. These four routes were the chief lines by which the riches of the barbarians flowed into Greece. Of course, among the great Greek cities themselves, scattered over the coasts of Asia Minor, Sicily, and Italy, and the mainland of Hellas, there was constant intercourse and a continual exchange of goods, for particular classes of which special cities and districts were famous. Thus Chios exported the finest GREEK TRADE-ROUTES 9 wine, as did Cnidus and Thasos ; the wool of the Milesians, probably derived from Phrygia, was universally appreciated ; * Besitz und Erwerb, p. 459. CLASSES OF TRADERS 13 and afterwards that of Alexander the Great in the Levant, the money of Corinth in Sicily and on the Adriatic, and the gold coins of Philip in Central Europe. But usually the money received by merchants had to be either expended by them in the same or a neighbouring port, or else taken away and melted down in order to pass as bullion. Therefore, after disposing of his cargo, the merchant would search about for a new stock of goods such as he might judge to be in demand at his native city or elsewhere ; and thus the process already described would be repeated. It will be' evident from this description that merchants among the Greeks could not usually confine themselves to dealing in one or two classes of goods, but must be ready to purchase whatever was cheap. There were, perhaps, exceptions in case of dealers who attended specially to classes of goods in demand everywhere, such as corn and slaves. Transactions among Greeks took place for money, but, in dealing with the barbarians, the Greeks retained barter at all periods of their trade. ' PoliiicSj L 6, 14. WeUdon's translation. EAELY MEASURES OF VALUE 21 "We can trace, though not in detail, three stages through which trade passed in early Greece, in the development of a coinage : (1) The pre-metallic stage. Among the more backward races of the world even now, or until very recently, the medium of exchange or measure of value has been some article which was portable, and the value of which was recognized by all. Every reader of travels in Africa knows that, in the interior of that continent, the yard of cloth is or was the unit of value : the traveller bargains with a chief as regards the number of yards he must pay for permission to pass through the chiefs territory. In China, shells passed as currency, as in parts of Africa and South Asia : we are even told that compressed cubes of tea passed as currency in Turkestan. Much curious lore of this kind is to be found in Ridgeway's Origin of Currency. The only pre-metallic unit of value which we can clearly trace in Greece is cattle, the ox in particular, which served as the measure of wealth to the Homeric Achaeans. The wellknown Homeric line, * Arms worth a hundred kine for arms worth nine,' proves this. In the early laws of Rome, as well as in the laws of Draco, fines were assessed in oxen. And the very word pecunia, which is closely related to pecus, a flock, bears record of a time when in Latium wealth was calculated in flocks and herds, as was wealth in Palestine in the days of Job. (2) The next stage in currency is the use of the precious metals by weight. When once gold, silver, and bronze circulated freely, their superior fitness as currency enabled them to drive out all competitors. An ox is well enough to reckon by, but when it comes to halves and quarters of the unit a difficulty arises ; the half of an ox would be a most inconvenient thing to take in payment. But metals can easily be divided and lose nothing in the process. In fact, in the ancient world most nations which had passed beyond the stage of barter used the precious metals by weight in their trade. This fact is made familiar to us by several passages in Genesis. 'Abraham weighed to Ephron the * GriecJi. Geschichte, ii. 1, S45. 2 5^^jj^^^and xvi, below. 33 INTEODUCTION with the state coinage, but their success must have been both slight and transient. Fortunately we are able, within certain limits, to fix the relative values of gold, silver, electrum,and bronze in different regions at successive periods of history. I propose in this place to give a summary of our knowledge of the matter which in future chapters I can expand. s regards the proportional values of the three metals, gold, silver, and electrum, in the ancient world we owe an excellent summary of our knowledge to an investigation by M. Theodore Eeinach.^On nearly all points the conclusions of M. Eeinach, based as they are upon a careful examination of ancient texts and inscriptions and of extant coins, seem to me to be solidly established. In Asia, from the beginning of coinage down to the middle of the fourth century, the ratio of value between gold and silver was 13^to 1. This is a view maintained by Mommsen and Brandis, and it seems trustworthy. It is indeed established by induction from a consideration of the Persian coinage. The gold daric or stater in that empire weighed up to 130 grains (grm. 8*42) and the silver shekel up to 86 grains (grm. 5'57). Now we know on the definite authority of Xenophon^that twenty of the silver coins passed as equivalent to one of the gold ; so we have the formula 1,720 grains of silver are equivalent to 130 of gold, and the relation between these numbers is nearly 13-| to i. The same equation holds in the Lydian coinage which preceded the daric; and we cannot doubt that it was an old-established equivalence. Herodotus, it is true, in his account of the revenues of Persia,* says that gold was thirteen times as valuable as silver ; but this is clearly only an approximate statement. The relation 13^to 1, although at first glancê Especially useful are papers by M. E. Babelon, Origines de la monnaie, 1897, chs. 6-8, and by M. Theodore Keinach, VRistoire par les monnaies, 1902, chs. 4 and 5. VSistoire par les monnaies, 1902, ch. 4. 3 Anab. i. 7, 18. Cyrus pays 3,000 darics in discharge of a debt of ten talents of silver, or 60,000 shekels. * Hdt. iii. 95, 1. * Origines de la monnaie, pp. 93-134. * Head, H. N., p. 416. * Hicks and Hill, Greek hist inscr.^p. 181. * Memoires, 1911, p. 351. VAnarchie monetaire. Keil, Fragm. cow., ii. 563 ; fragment 66. ' Brit. Mus. Gat., Thessaly, PJ. VI. 9 : cf, ch. xviii. Horsemen of Tarenfum, p. 136. a treasure including coins of Lete, Maroneia, Corinth, Naxos, Chios, Cos, Cyprus, and Cyrene. At Sakha was discovered a deposit,^including coins of Dieaea, Lete, Aegina, Corinth, Naxos, Pares, Chios, Clazomenae, lalysus and Lindus in Rhodes, and Cyrene. As with these coins were found fragments and bars of silver, the destination of this hoard for the melting-pot has been conjectured. The coins included in it belong to the most usual currencies of the eastern Mediterranean. A small find of coins of Cyrene from near Ramleh emphasizes the close connexion affirmed in historic records between Egypt and Cyrene. Another hoard, found in the Delta,^is very similar in composition to those above mentioned. It included a few coins of Athens, and examples of the coinages of Corinth,

Naturwissenschaften 95 (4) 361-66., 2008

Numerous objects of gold displaying an impressive variety of types and manufacturing techniques are known from the Late Bronze Age (LBA) contexts of Mycenaean Greece, but very little is known about the origin and processing of gold during the second millennium B.C. Ancient literature and recent research indicate that northern Greece is probably the richest gold-bearing region in Greece, and yet, very little evidence exists regarding the exploitation of its deposits and the production as well as use of gold in the area during prehistory. The unusual find of a group of small stone crucibles at the prehistoric settlement of Thessaloniki Toumba, one with visible traces of gold melting, proves local production and offers a rare opportunity to examine the process of on-site gold working. Furthermore, the comparison of the chemical composition of prehistoric artefacts from two settlements with those of gold deposits in their immediate areas supports the local extraction of gold and opens up the prospect for some of the Mycenaean gold to have originated in northern Greece. The scarcity of gold items in northern Greek LBA contexts may not represent the actual amount of gold produced and consumed, but could be a result of the local social attitudes towards the circulation and deposition of artefacts from precious metals.

Proceedings of the 15th Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research (held at Athens in June 2009). Published by the Academy of Athens.

In Aristophanes’ Acharnians (vv. 65-90) a group of Athenian ambassadors are shown returning from Persia and giving an account of their mission before the Athenian Assembly. They describe the vast Achaemenid Empire as a land in which everything is immense in size or quantity; among other things, they point out the abundance of gold, which is piled up into entire mountains and so plentiful that the king feels free to defecate on it. This is recognizably an ancient version of the “Eldorado” theme (the country where gold lies plentifully on the roads), familiar from European tales since the Renaissance and especially famous from Voltaire’s Candide. In my paper it is argued that Aristophanes’ description is based on an ancient Persian tale (burlesqued here in a typically Aristophanic manner) about a land of the “Eldorado” type; this tale must have been imported into Athens by envoys or workmen returning from Achaemenid Persia. There are two indications for the existence of such tales in ancient Persian tradition. Firstly, in the story about Kai Kaus’ expedition to Mazanderan (preserved in medieval Islamic sources like Firdawsi’s Shāhnāmeh but demonstrably going back to the first millennium B.C., like most of the tales about the legendary Kayanian kings), Mazanderan, the miraculous, demon-inhabited country, is depicted as a fabulously wealthy place, where gold is so abundant as to be used even for the headbands of slave-girls. Secondly, in the story of King Cambyses and his disastrous expedition against Aethiopia (narrated by Herodotus but ultimately stemming from Persian propagandistic narratives against Cambyses), the land of Aethiopia is so rich in gold, that the latter is used even for fabricating the prisoners’ chains. Other affiliated motifs (Cockaigne, abundance of food, springs or rivers of perfume) also bind together the aforementioned stories, which thus seem to originate in a common narrative tradition of the Achaemenid period.

AVREVS. Le Pouvoir de l’or / The Power of Gold, 2023

The IRAMAT-Centre Ernest-Babelon began analysing Greek gold at the end of the 1990s. The first efforts, all using the LA-ICP-MS method, mainly focused on the gold of the Hellenistic dynasties in the Eastern Mediterranean. The AVREVS project has provided an opportunity to extend the study to the gold coinage of Greek cities in the western Mediterranean. This article explores the results of the analyses of eastern gold and compares them with the results obtained for the Greek cities of the western Mediterranean, Carthage and Rome. It highlights a stock of Hellenistic gold with a very broad signature - maybe due to the remelting of the Persian treasures put into circulation following the Macedonian conquest - as well as the flow of metal during the reigns of Alexander and his successors. Western Greek golds are distinguished by different fingerprints confirmed by a separate circulation from that of the Eastern Mediterranean.