head of Pallas Athena), by five grains, her credit would have suffered and her merchants have gained nothing by it, as the balance would have been at once resorted to, and allowance would have had to be made on each coin of the new debased standard. We who live in modern times are too apt to forget the readiness with which men in older days had resort to the scales, although at this moment large transactions in gold between bankers and financiers are carried out by weight. Only so late as the beginning of this century, when the gold coinage of the country was in a wretched state, every farmer and trader went to fairs in Ireland equipped with a pocket balance (which was adjusted for the guinea, half-guinea, sovereign, half-sovereign, and gold seven-shilling-piece).
It is difficult then to see what it would have availed the Aeginetans to have reduced the standard which they are supposed to have got from the Phoenicians.
Their island state was of diminutive proportions; they devoted themselves almost entirely to traffick by sea, their island was an emporium where strangers resorted. In all dealings with the Phoenicians they would have to pay a drawback on their debased coin; for the cunning Phoenician or Ionian was not likely to be beguiled into taking staters of 200 grs. as equivalent to 230 grs. It is plain therefore that when we find divergencies of standard these are not due to mere degradation, but to some far more practical consideration, and this will be seen all the more clearly when we shall find that whilst we have divergencies in silver standards, the gold standard which was in use in Greece from Homeric times down to the Roman Conquest remains almost absolutely without variation. But there are other and stronger objections against the Phoenician origin of the Aeginetic standard.
Now if we accept the doctrine that the Greeks received their coin-standards across the sea from Asia, the Aeginetic from the Phoenician