glamour of a “scientific” metrological system, scholars have turned their backs upon scientific method. Whilst our knowledge of the Assyrian and Egyptian weight systems is most imperfect, being derived from literary monuments, or from inscriptions on weights not half understood, the systems of Greece and Rome are known to us not simply from the vast literatures written in languages thoroughly intelligible, but likewise from the evidence of immense numbers of coins struck in gold and silver, by the weights of which we are enabled to check off and substantiate the literary sources.
As Greece coined money several centuries before Italy, and as its literature reaches much further back than that of Rome, it is plain that any sound enquiry into the origin of weight standards must commence with Greece. We shall therefore without further preface proceed to investigate the evidence afforded to us by the oldest Greek records.
The Homeric Talent.
In the Homeric Poems, which cannot be dated later than the eighth century B.C., there is as yet no trace of coined money. We find nevertheless in those Poems two units of value; the one is the cow (or ox), or the value of a cow, the other is the Talent (τάλαντον). The former is the one which has prevailed, and does still prevail, in barbaric communities, such as the Zulus of South Africa, where the sole or principal wealth consists in herds and flocks. For several reasons we may assign to it priority in age as compared with the Talent. In the first place it represents the most primitive form of exchange, the barter of one article of value for another, before the employment of the precious metals as a medium of currency; consequently the estimation of values by the cow is older than that by means of a Talent or “weight” of gold, or silver or copper. Again, in Homer, all values are expressed in so many oxen, as “golden arms for brazen, those worth one hundred beeves, for those worth nine beeves2” (Il. VI. 236).