![]() ![]() ![]() Get Your Copy of Whitman’s 100 Greatest Ancient Coins: Second Edition from CoinWeek Supplies for 25% off Cover Price. And all Greeks attending the games, even Spartans, used the special coinage struck by the city of Elis, which managed the sacred site of Olympia.īecause Sparta sometimes allied with Persia and received Persian subsidies during its long wars with Athens, Spartans would have been familiar with the Persian daric – at 8.4 grams and over 95% pure, the most common high-value gold coin used by Greeks before the time of Alexander the Great. Because of their selective breeding and superb physical fitness, Spartans were serious contenders in the Olympic Games. Other People’s MoneyĪmong themselves, Spartans might use awkward bundles of iron spits for legal or ceremonial transactions, but in dealings with other Greeks they had to use current money. The Greek word for roasting spits ( obeloi,) however, is closely related to the word for a small silver coin ( obol), so the connection is credible. Plutarch’s chronology is shaky – if Lycurgus actually existed, he probably lived a century before Greeks began to use coins. The purpose of this policy was to discourage Spartans from accumulating wealth so they could focus their energies on preparation for war. “…e commanded that all gold and silver coin should be called in, and that only a sort of money made of iron should be current, a great weight and quantity of which was but very little worth so that to lay up twenty or thirty pounds there was required a pretty large closet, and, to remove it, nothing less than a yoke of oxen…For the iron money could not be carried into the rest of Greece, nor had it any value there, but was rather held in ridicule.” ![]()
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