Golden Nuggets: The Ancient Greeks

An occasional series of curiosities of Gold, its history and ideas about it.

By Mark Rogers 

The Ancient Greeks had no gold.

So much has come down to us from the Ancient Greeks – philosophy, history, poetry, architecture and sculpture – that it is often forgotten that the Greeks were a relatively poor people for much of their history. What we know of the ancient Greeks was made possible by the defeat of the Persians, firstly by the Athenians at Marathon in 490 B.C., and then again in 480 B.C. when a large Greek army beat the Persians at Salamis. Without these defeats, the Greeks would have been subsumed under the despotic Persian Empire – with incalculable results not only for Greek culture but the whole of European history.

These defeats were the triumph of an agrarian and small city-state civilization, a people who struggled in fierce competition even to subsist on silver, over an Empire which at the time of its defeat had amassed a considerable proportion of the known world’s available gold; the robust determination of the Greeks not to vanish into an oriental despotism secured their victory over such a wealthy power, backed by gold.

Until then, gold had been centred on a territory bounded by Egypt, Asia Minor and the Black Sea; henceforth, gold was to move steadily into Europe, first through the agency of the Greeks and then the Romans.

But the Greeks had no gold of their own; indeed, they knew so little of the sources of gold that they were inclined, out of a sense of awe, to exaggerate the fame and riches of ancient sources such as the River Pactolus: this was the most renowned source of gold in the ancient world. Its identity now uncertain, it then flowed down from Mount Tmolus in the highlands of Anatolia, bearing vast quantities of alluvial gold, which tended to be the natural alloy electrum, “white gold”, composed of random quantities of gold and silver. In spite of Greek exaggeration, these quantities were huge enough, providing a rich source throughout the Persian and later Greek periods. Upon this wealth of gold was created the kingdom of Lydia, the most famous monarch of which was Croesus.

His eponymous (”as rich as Croesus”) wealth had a considerable impact on the Greeks. He was a sophisticated Hellenophile who went to great, indeed munificent, lengths to conciliate Greek feeling by the gold which he offered to the shrine of Apollo at Delphi – that most important of all the religious cities in the ancient Greek world, renowned for its political acumen and internationalism. Herodotus recounts that he  not only gave cups of gold and couches covered in gilt and silver, but also an immense quantity of ingots:

“He melted down a great quantity of gold and fashioned ingots from it, making them six palms [i.e. about 18 inches] in length and three in breadth, and one palm high; and their number was one hundred and seventeen. Four of these were of pure gold, each weighing two and a half talents [i.e. some 550 lbs in all]: the others were of gold alloyed with silver, weighing two talents each. And he also had made a lion of pure gold weighing 10 talents … and two mixing bowls of great size … of which the golden one … weighed over eight and a half talents. … He also sent the golden figure of a woman 3 cubits high … and dedicated his wife’s necklaces and girdles.”

Estimating that the ingots made of the alloy contained at least 50% gold then Croesus’s benefaction must have contained a minimum of 7,500 pounds of the yellow metal.

(Source for this article: C. H. V. Sutherland, “Gold, Its Beauty, Power and Allure”, 3rd revsied and enlarged edition, Thames and Hudson, London, 1969)

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GOLDEN NUGGETS: THE ANCIENT GREEKS was first posted on March 10, 2012 at 8:56 am.
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