money and coins 1. In Greece. Coinage in the sense of marked metal pieces of standard weight is now generally agreed to have been first used in Asia Minor, in the second half of the seventh century BC, and by the end of the sixth century BC many Greek states had adopted a coinage, mostly based on silver.
Before coinage proper, the Greeks had a primitive currency based on the iron cooking-spit, obelos; from this derived the names and equivalences of the Greek silver coinage (see DRACHMA). (In Sparta, spits continued to be the only permitted currency long after all other states had coinage.)
Greek money values may be summarized as follows.
At Athens at the end of the fifth century BC a building worker or a rower on a trireme would receive one drachma a day, but would be unlikely to earn more than 300 drachmas in a year. He could feed himself, on bread and ‘relish’ (i.e. meat, fish, vegetables, or fruit), for a little over a drachma a week. 50 minas was regarded as a large sum to pay for a house; a mean dwelling could have been bought for three.
The coinage of Philip II of Macedon and, especially, of his son Alexander the Great had world-wide circulation; Alexander and his successors introduced portraits of themselves, some of them very fine, on their coins.
2. At Rome. The cities of Magna Graecia in south Italy issued splendid series of silver coins as early as the sixth century BC, and in Etruria, to the north of Rome, coinage began in the fifth century BC. But in the rest of Italy at this time coinage, such as it was, consisted of rough lumps of bronze (aes rudē) of irregular weight and without any mark of standard value. The Latin word for money, pecunia, is probably derived from the use of livestock, pecus, as units of exchange. Later, bronze was in circulation in the form of rectangular bars, but not until the beginning of the third century BC were these issued in a roughly standard weight, equivalent to about 1.5 kg. (3.3 lb.). The earliest Roman coins proper were issued twenty years later. They were heavy bronze pieces of circular form; each was known as an aes or as (pl. asses) and weighed one Roman pound (twelve Roman ounces or 327 g.).
At the end of the third century BC Rome introduced the silver denarius, roughly equivalent in value to the Greek drachma. The common unit of currency, in which the Romans expressed even very large sums of money, was the sestertius, a coin worth a quarter of a denarius.
The early silver coins (from the late third century BC) sometimes bear the name or other indication of the magistrate who struck them. Julius Caesar was the first to have his own head represented on Roman coins, and we have a series of portraits of the emperors on their coins.
