festival of the year 438 B.C. As not more than 10 to 11 talents of gold were used in the three years to which the fragments refer, Köhler draws the inference that the construction of the statue commenced in the same year as that of the Parthenon (447 B.C.), and that Pheidias was engaged on his great work for fully nine years.
We thus know now the relative value of silver and gold in Attica about 450 B.C. But we must not regard this as the relation which existed at earlier times. It was only after the Persian wars that Athens had got possession of the island of Thasos with its rich gold mines, and the equally rich districts on the Thracian coast. The fact of her coming into the possession of such wealthy gold-producing regions must have materially lowered the price of gold in Athens. We know how the development of the mines of Pangaeum by Philip of Macedon in the following century lowered the value of gold throughout Greece, for by the time of Alexander the relative value of the two precious metals was as 10:1. In the sixth century B.C. gold was so scarce in Greece that when the Spartans wanted to make a dedication in gold they had to send to Asia to obtain a sufficient supply of the metal28. Hence if we conclude that in earlier times the relative value of gold to silver in Greece proper was as 15:1, we