which yielded a salubrious but somewhat unpleasant medicine, is regarded not as holding its place on the coins of Cyrene and its sister towns because it formed the chief staple of trade, but because forsooth it may have been the symbol of Aristaeus, "the protector of the corn-field and the vine and all growing crops, and bees and flocks and shepherds, and the averter of the scorching blasts of the Sahara." There is probably just as much evidence for this as there is for believing that the beaver on some Canadian coins and stamps is symbolical of St Lawrence, after whom the great Canadian river is named, the warm skin of the beaver indicating that the saint of the red-hot gridiron is the averter of the cruel and biting blasts that sweep down from the icy North. I do not for a moment mean that mythological and religious subjects do not play their proper part in Greek coin types. But it is just as wrong to reduce all coin types to this category as it would be to regard them all as merely symbolic of the natural and manufactured products of the various states. If however we can show that certain coins, even in historical times, were regarded as the representations of the objects of barter of more primitive times, we shall have established a firm basis from which to make further advances.
In those now famous Cretan inscriptions found at Gortyn[1] certain sums are counted by kettles (lebetes, [Greek: lebêtes]) and pots (tripods, [Greek: tripodes]). Some have thought that these are the same objects which are called staters in later forms of the same documents. But recently M. Svoronos[2] has advanced a very plausible hypothesis that the lebetes and tripods of the inscriptions really refer not to an actual currency in the kettles and pots of the old Homeric times, but to certain Cretan coins which are countermarked with a stamp, which he recognizes in many examples as a lebes, and in at least one case as a tripod. Whether the first hypothesis, that actual kettles and pots were indicated
- ↑ Comparetti, Leggi antiche della città di Gortyna in Creta, 1885; Museo Italiano II. 195, no. 39: ibid, II. 222. Roberts, Greek Epigraphy, p. 53.
- ↑ Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique, 1888, p. 405 seqq. (where he gives an engraving of a stater so countermarked). Mr B. V. Head (Numism. Chron. 3rd ser. IX. 242) in a notice of this paper lends his great authority to the support of Svoronos' view.
