7. Coinage And The Transformation Of Greek Warfare

Abstract

Coinage had appeared in the Greek cities in the mid-sixth century BCE, an innovation imported from the east and attributed to the Lydians. Several Greek traditions associate early coinages with single rulers rather than communal city-states. Such traditions saw the reform of weights and measures and the establishment of prices in the careers of proto-tyrants like Pheidon of Argos or lawgivers like Solon of Athens. A common theme of tyranny from the sixth to the fourth century was the need for money to support the tyrant and his regime. In the Classical period large scale minting of coins can often be associated with military activity. The symbolic value of the coin became the testimony to the relationship either between a state and its citizens or its subject allies or as a symbol of the relationship between individuals with reciprocal ties of responsibility and investment towards each other. Keywords: coinage; Greek Warfare; Solon

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 22 citations exist upstream.