By 600 B. C.E. trade was flourishing in and out of Greek ports, both on the mainland and abroad in the Greek colonies, and the Greeks began using coins (previously, all trade was conducted using the barter system, where goods were exchanged for other goods). Herodotus credits the wealthy Lydian kingdom in Anatolia, west of Ionia the Lydians of Anatolia, with introducing coins as currency in the sixth century B. C.E., though until the Persian Wars there was little actual money circulating in Greece. The Lydian coins were made of electrum, a combination of gold and silver, and they were stamped with an official seal to prove they were genuine. When silver was discovered at Laurium, Athenian silver coins became abundant. They were stamped with an owl on one side (a symbol of Athena) and the head of a god on another. The government symbols and heads of famous people found on today’s coins trace their roots to that practice.
One silver drachma was about what one skilled worker earned each day. Six thousand drachmas equaled one talent. An obol was one-sixth of a drachma, and bought enough bread for one day. One obol was equal to several copper coins. Each polis had its own coinage, and with all the money that began circulating in Greece, exchanging money and banking became common professions later in the fifth century B. C.E. It often was the work of metics or even slaves.
During the Peloponnesian War, Sparta helped Athenian slaves escape the silver mines, and for a while silver coins were replaced by bronze ones. Aristophanes (c. 450-c. 388 B. C.E.) has a humorous scene in one of his plays in which a character is just about to pay for some bread with his copper coins when a town crier announces that silver is now Athens’s legal tender. If only he had bought the bread a few moments sooner!
Metics
Mfnc Occupations
In the years 401 and 400 B. C.E. the Athenian government awarded several metics citizenship for their help in overthrowing the 30 Tyrants (see page 41). The occupations listed for them included cook, carpenter, gardener, baker, household servant, and nut-seller.
By the middle of the fifth century B. C.E. there were about half as many male metics in Athens as male citizens. Early in the sixth century B. C.E., Solon encouraged their immigration to Athens with liberal citizenship laws, but 150 years later citizenship was considered more valuable and Pericles restricted citizenship to the children of two Athenian parents. Yet metics flocked to Athens, drawn by the economic opportunities they found there.
Metics had no real political power or rights, but many grew rich as manufacturers or in commerce or banking. Socrates had a friend, Cephalus from Syracuse, whose shield factory employed more than 100 slaves. Wealthy metics, in fact, had similar public obligations to wealthy citizens, and helped fund civic projects. Some of Athens’s more notable metics included the doctor Hippocrates (c. 460-c. 377 b. c.e.), the historian Herodotus, and Aristotle, the great fourth-century B. C.E. philosopher.
World History
