Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/332

Fig. 32. Coin of Cyzicus with tunny fish.

electrum coins of Cyzicus, and a tunny's head is found upon some very archaic silver coins from the Santorin 'find' which Mr Head places at the top of the whole Cyzicene series, but no one has, as far as I am aware, yet hitherto attempted to mythologize it^[1], although the fecundity of this fish would make it just as suitable an emblem for Aphrodite as the "lascivious turtle," and the traders of Cyzicus might quite as well wear the badge of the goddess of the sea as the merchants of Aegina, for there is just as much or just as little evidence for Phoenician influences at Cyzicus as there is at Aegina. From what we have learned in an earlier chapter we know that the articles which form the staple commodities of a community in the age of barter virtually form its money. In a city like Cyzicus whose citizens depended for their wealth on their fisheries and trade, rather than on flocks or herds and agriculture, the tunny fish singly or in certain defined numbers, as by the score or hundred and the like, would naturally form a chief monetary unit, just as we found the stock fish employed in mediaeval Iceland. Are we not then justified in considering the tunny fish, which forms the invariable adjunct of the coins of Cyzicus, as an indication that these coins superseded a primitive system in which the tunny formed a monetary unit, just as the Kettle and Pot counter-marks on the coins of Crete point back to the days when real kettles formed the chief medium of exchange? But far stronger evidence is at hand to show that the tunny fish was used as a monetary unit in some parts of Hellas. We have had occasion to refer to the city of Olbia which lay on the north shore of the Black Sea. It was a Milesian colony,

1. Fishermen offered to Poseidon the first tunny they caught (Athen. p. 346), but this was simply an offering of first fruits and not because the tunny was sacred.