traders whose commerce lay with Aegina and Peloponnesus, the Euboic on the other hand from Lydia by way of the great Ionian cities on the coast of Asia Minor, we become involved in a serious difficulty. At the time represented in the Homeric Poems, there is not as yet a single Greek colony on the coast of Asia Minor34. Miletus, destined to be in after years the Queen of Ionia, and to be one of the greatest centres of Hellenic commerce and culture, is as yet known only as the city of the barbarous-speaking Carians35. Yet we find the Greeks represented in these self-same poems as already in possession of a standard for gold identical with the light Babylonian or Lydian gold shekel (130 grs.). But again we find from the same source that the Greeks were already in full commercial intercourse with one Asiatic people, but not a people who could serve as a bridge between Lydia and Euboea. Everywhere in the Homeric Poems we meet the shipmen of Tyre, who are represented as bringing the products of the skilled artists of Sidon, beautiful cloths, and cunningly wrought vessels of silver, articles of jewellery, necklaces36 set with amber (perhaps brought from the coasts of the Baltic), and now and then as chance arose, kidnapping women and children to sell as slaves in the marts of the Mediterranean37.
If the Hellenes had got their standard from an Asiatic source, it must have been the heavy gold shekel of 260 grains, which the Phoenicians employed, and consequently the Homeric Talent would have weighed 260 instead of 130 grains, or on the other hand if it be supposed that the Greeks might borrow and use for their own gold a standard used only for silver in Asia, the Homeric Talent ought to have weighed 225 grains, that is the Phoenician silver standard, which, as we have seen, it certainly did not.
A further difficulty arises in reference to the Euboic standard. No one who reflects for a moment could venture to assert that Phoenician trade and influence were limited to Southern Greece. Yet that virtually is the tacit assumption made by those who derive the standard from Asia.