with another most certainly wrong, i.e., that Pheidon was the inventor of every other kind of money as well as silver) as regards the invention of weights by Pheidon, although from the passage in Herodotus already quoted, metrologists one after another have assumed that the measures (μέτρα) meant a metric system in the modern sense, and have not hesitated to build on this somewhat crazy foundation an elaborate Aeginetic system of weights and measures intimately related to each other.
We are then probably justified in assuming that Pheidon coined silver at Aegina. The numismatic evidence coincides with the literary authorities. The coins of Aegina are well known, for from first to last the symbol of the sea tortoise (χελώνη, from which they are called in vulgar parlance tortoises) is found on them. Why Pheidon set up his mint in Aegina instead of in his own city of Argos is not very difficult to understand. Argos was an inland town remote from the highways of commerce, and little in contact with the merchants of the Levant. On the other hand Aegina stood at the portal of central Greece, intercepting the trade of Athens and Corinth; in later days Pericles called it the “eyesore of the Piraeus.” It would be probably here that the Greeks first saw the new invention of the East in the hands of the foreign traders, and it would be here, in a great emporium, that the need of a currency would be most felt. In an inland city like Argos or Sparta bars of bronze or iron would serve well for the small commercial transactions of a very primitive society, as we know that the iron currency actually did at Sparta in historical times. E. Curtius suggested (Numism. Chron., 1870) that the tortoise on the Aeginetan coins, which is the symbol of Ashtaroth who was the Phoenician goddess both of the sea and of trade, may be an indication that the mint was set up in the temple of Aphrodite, which overlooked the great harbour of Aegina. Whilst his hypothesis as regards the origin of the tortoise type on the coin is probably wrong, it is quite possible that the coins were first struck in some temple, as we know that the great shrines of the ancient world served as banks and treasuries, as for example the