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82 Invention of Coinage and Monetization of Ancient Greece existed and was not revived; the simple measures of gift giving, plunder, and communal feasting were not adequate to the needs of an urban community, even a small one.7 U T E N S I L M O N E Y At first, the economic vacuum seems to have been filled by a continuing elaboration of the “primitive money” of Homeric society. To Homer, tripods and cauldrons had been gifts or prizes, but although Agamemnon might promise Achilles “twenty shining cauldrons, untouched by the flame,” nobody seems to have thought of demanding a number of cauldrons as a fine or a deposit. Indeed, Homer’s interest in their quality shows clearly that Agamemnon’s cauldrons lacked at least one characteristic of money: they were not interchangeable with each other.8 By the eighth century in Crete, it would seem, things had changed. The mentions of cauldrons in the inscriptions of the Pythium at Gortyn are very fragmentary, but numerous: - posit one hundred [cau]ldrons e[ach- . . . to redistribute . . . should break up [a hundred?] cauld[rons . . . - [to b]e under oath for [t]en cauldrons- - [let them se]t down fifty c(?)[auldrons- - [cauld]rons each- - six [c]auldrons of th[e- - [twen]ty cauldrons- - [let them set do]wn fifty [cauldronstwenty cauldr[ons- - to set down f(?)ifty caul[drons for e]ach. If the serving kosmos should not pay in, he h[imself] and the titas [shall o]we if he should not pay i[n- - for each one to set [d]own a cauldron. The same man shall not be kosmos within three years, nor gnomon within ten . . . - [whoever] stirs up [the law suit] shall set down five cauldrons, and if there should co[me -]9 7. For a broader picture of the economic expansion of these centuries, see Starr, Economic and Social Growth. 8. Cf. p. 69. 9. IC IV 14 g–p. Cf IC IV 1.3 d–f; 5.2; 8 e–f; 10 f–h, s–t, a*–b*, p*; 11 h–i; 21.7–8. Note Guarducci’s comments at IC IV, pp. 41–42 and on the various inscriptions, as well as her article The Archaic Age 83 Exactly what is going on in any one of these sentence fragments is most unclear, but it is hard to escape the impression that cauldrons, as inconvenient as they may seem to be, were functioning as a medium of payment in Gortyn, in which fines could be assessed and deposits demanded. One might suppose that the cauldrons are mere shorthand for “a cauldron full” of some more convenient article such as barley, but that is not likely. A cauldron (λ  εβης) is not a vessel of fixed proportions, and the Greeks of the archaic period seem to have been able, as were their Bronze Age ancestors, to measure volume with a regular system of measures, none of which was ever called a “cauldron.” Although it may seem odd to demand that each citizen be ready with what can only seem to us the inventory of a small housewares shop, it may be that these payments were envisaged only for those citizens of the upper class from which the magistrates came, people with “tripods in their house and abundant cauldrons.”10 For lesser people, smaller utensils would do; and at a number of sites, iron spits have been found in contexts that strongly suggest a use as currency.11 Spits are sometimes found in burials, much as later Greeks buried coins with their dead.12 Plutarch claims that spits were once used as money,13 and the Greek language supports him: the smallest silver coins of the classical period were indeed called oboloi, “spits,” and six of them made a drachme, or “handful ” (fig. 6).14 There are, in fact, stone receptacles designed to hold spits, and “Tripodi, lebeti, oboli.” I have not included the single mention of a tripod in these inscriptions (IC IV 8 a–d), because it is not clear that the τρ ιποδα  ενα mentioned there as a penalty is really fulfilling a use any different than it would have in Homer. The square brackets in the text represent, as normal in epigraphy, letters not legible on the stone. My rough translations here necessarily gloss over many difficulties in the Greek. 10. [Hom.] Hymn. Herm. 61. 11. See Courbin, “Dans la Grèce.” 12. Stevens, 227. These spits may, however, have been simply items for use...

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