3

that the crime was in most states a capital one, has already been mentioned. The false moneyer, whether a private person or the state official, was subject to the same penalty. The death penalty is mentioned in the inscription relating to the Lesbio-Phocaean electrum union 1. In Rome, the adulteration of gold or silver was regarded as equivalent to forgery". The lex Iulia peculatus of Augustus provided against the adulteration of the public gold, silver, or bronze. Of the enactments of the later emperors, that of Tacitus is worthy of notice, making it a capital offence (involving confiscation of the offender's property) to alloy gold with silver, silver with bronze, or bronze with lead. And there are numerous provisions against the issue from the mint of cast instead of struck coins.

$5. Protection by Tariff.

As we have said, money to which the law gave an arbitrarily high value within the district subject to that law, fell to its proper value outside the limits of the jurisdiction concerned. Similarly money which was thoroughly sound was, it might be supposed, always worth carrying with one". In the autonomous period of Greek history this was probably always the case. But when the Greek world became subject to Rome, certain measures were taken by the mistress of the world towards protecting her own money; the money, i. e. of the Roman state, and that issued by Rome for provincial purposes. The denarius being in Imperial times made the official money of account all over the world, all forms of money were brought into rough and ready relations with the denarius, and always to their disadvantage. Before Imperial times we see a similar measure adopted to the disadvantage of the tetradrachms of the Attic standard still in circulation, which were assimilated in value, though not in weight, to the lighter cistophoric

See below, ch. iv. § 13.

Lege Cornelia cavetur, ut qui in aurum vitii quid addiderit, qui argenteos nummos adulterinos flaverit, falsi crimine teneri' (Ulpian, Dig. xlviii. 10. 9). Notice the distinction between the gold, which was in bars, and the silver, which was coined.

3 Mommsen, iii. p. 37; Dig. xlviii. 13. 1.

Scr. Hist. Aug. Tacit. 9.

Xen. De Vect. iii. 2.

standard1. In Imperial times, the silver tetradrachms issued from the mint of Antioch were tariffed at three denarii, whereas four would have been a fairer estimate. Similarly the last drachms issued from the Rhodian mint (after B. c. 88) were probably made to exchange against Roman denarii, considerably to the advantage of the latter, which weighed only about 3.88 g. as against 4.21 to 4.53 g.2.

§ 6. Relative Values of the Metals.

Closely connected with the question of the adulteration of money by the state is a problem which in the present day has assumed remarkable proportions. This problem is concerned with the relation of the various metals to each other. So long as the coinage of Greece was confined to a single metal, the others circulating merely in uncoined form, no difficulty could have arisen. The state of things must have been parallel to that in Mediaeval Europe, from the disappearance of gold in the seventh century down to its reappearance in the middle of the thirteenth. But in so far as gold, electrum or bronze circulated beside silver, a very natural attempt was made to fix the relation between the metals. Some states, such as Athens, seem to have been content to leave the matter to the market; they struck their gold coins of a certain weight, their silver also of a certain weight, but made no attempt, so far as we can judge from the coins, to fix a rate of exchange. But other states, such as Syracuse, were continually altering the weights in their gold coins, in order to bring them into satisfactory relation with the silver. The frequency of such alterations is sufficient to show that the system was a failure. The extraordinary complications of the standards of weight in the Greek world are mainly due to the attempt to adjust the weights of the coins to the relative value of the two metals".

In regard to the relative values of the three chief metals, a brief summary of the results arrived at by various investigators must suffice. Throughout, we have to remember that

1 See above, p. 39.

2 Head, Brit. Mus. Catal., Caria, &c., p. cxiii.

3 The evidence for this will be found in ch. ii.

* See especially Hultsch, Metrologie (1882), Index, s. v. Werthverhältniss; Lenormant, La Monnaie, i. pp. 145 ff.

there is often a distinction between the actual rate of exchange and the rate, often arbitrary, assumed for the purposes of coinage.

Relation of gold to silver.-At and long before the time of the introduction of money, the normal rate of exchange between gold and silver was 133: 1 in Babylonia and in the nations commercially dependent on it. The early coins of Chios give a rate of 13.84: 1. According to Herodotus', the rate prevailing in the Persian kingdom was 13: 1. So far as Athens was concerned the rate was not legally fixed, and we find that it fluctuates from 11: 1 up to 14 : 1 during the fifth and fourth centuries B. C. The metals were allowed to find their own levels, and such too was the case in Macedon, where Alexander's coinage shows that no rate was fixed. There was a popular idea that gold might be regarded as roughly ten times as valuable as silver, and many calculations seem to have been made on this basis. In one case we find a rate of 10: I fixed by law, viz. in the treaty of Rome with the Aetolians in 189 B. C. And this was the rate in the Cimmerian Bosporus before the days of Alexander. It is safe to regard 12: I or

;

12: I as the most usual rate in the Mediterranean basin under ordinary circumstances. But there are frequent exceptions. Thus the earliest coinage of Etruria proves a decimal relation the coinage of the same district in the fourth century a ratio of 15: 1. The rate at Carthage in 306 B. c. was also 10: I, owing probably to the adulteration of the gold coinage. The earliest Roman gold coinage (217 B. C.) is evidence for the extraordinary high rate of 17: 12. During the last two centuries of the Roman Republic the legal rate was probably 11.90: I. But the discovery of gold in Noricum in the middle of the second century B. C. sent the price of gold down by one-third, and although it recovered, it suffered a similar shock from Caesar's Gallic victories a century later. Under the Early Empire the rate is 12.5 1. Nero's adulteration of the coinage, owing to which the silver coins became merely a money of account, gave gold an arbitrarily low value (10.31 : 1, and in the next century 9.375: 1), from which it only really recovered under Diocletian, who fixed the ratio at 13.67: 1. From Constantine I to

1 iii. 95.

But the circumstances were special. See below, ch. iv. § 11.

Theodosius the rate ranges from 13.89 to 14·40: 1'. About the year 400 the rate is as high as 15.18: 1.

In Sicily the relation between gold and silver was, as we have seen (pp. 42, 43), subject to considerable fluctuations, ranging from 15: 1, on which ratio the first gold coins were issued, down to IO: I.

Relation of silver to copper.-In countries where a copper standard was in vogue, this relation was of course important; but where, as in the greater part of Greece, and in Italy after the introduction of a silver coinage, silver was the standard metal, copper coins were merely a money of account, and the relation of silver to copper is unimportant for our purposes.

The rate 120: I was that prevailing in Ptolemaic times 2, and it is probable that it also prevailed in the Aegean in very early days, long before the coinage of copper. We have seen (p. 37) that to explain the origin of the Euboic standard it is necessary to suppose that the great copper-city, Chalcis, put an unusually high value on copper, making the rate 96: 1, a difference of onefifth; but this was of course an exceptional rate. Lenormant arrives at a rate varying between 120:1 and 100:1 as the most probable one, both for commercial and monetary purposes, in the Greek world. The rate 105: I can be fixed for the district north of the Euxine from the aes grave of the great commercial city of Olbia. For the rest of Greece, after the time of Alexander, the actual value of copper is in no way to be ascertained from the coinage in that metal, which is purely a token-money.

In the West, if we exclude Carthage, the relation between the two metals was very different. The original rate appears to have been 288: 1, but with increasing commerce, and the consequently increasing influx of silver, the rate gradually sank. The gradual fall in the value of silver, as compared with bronze, keeps pace with, or rather is the chief cause of, the fall in the weight of the bronze coins of the Republic. The monetary exchange value (56: 1) established in 89 B. C. (the

1 Under Julian the actual rate was 14.25: 1, the rate fixed for coinage

12: I.

The latest discussion of the most difficult problem of the silver and copper coinage of the Ptolemies is by B. P. Grenfell (Revenue-Laws of Ptolemy Philadelphus, pp. 193 ff.).

date of the introduction of the semuncial as) does not however express the real commercial value of bronze. The same is true of the rates fixed under Augustus (56: 1), Nero (71.11: I), and Trajan (80 : 1). Brass, which was largely employed for coinage under the Empire, was also fixed at an arbitrary value, and retained a constant relation to copper of 2: I.

Electrum, which was regarded for the purpose of coinage as a distinct metal, was rated at ten times the value of silver, both in Asia Minor and in Greece Proper. Gold being to silver as 13}: 1, the rate of 10: I would be true of a mixture in which seventy-three per cent. of gold and twenty-seven per cent. of silver were combined. It has already been remarked that as a matter of fact the ingredients varied very considerably from this standard.