AURUM
AURUM Gold, from its malleability and the circumstance that it
is found lying in lumps, was one of the earliest of metals used by man, and
among the most primitive resources of civilization. This was suspected by
the ancients, who make the earliest age of the world's history an age of
gold. In the Heroic age, we find that gold was put to a great variety of
uses. Homer speaks of the houses of Menelaus and Alcinous as full of silver
and gold; the armour of Glaucus was of gold (
Il.
6.236), so were the handmaids of Hephaestus (
Il. 18.417), and the doves on Nestor's cup
(
Il. 11.632). So in the decoration of
the shield of Achilles, the chest of Cypselus, and other works of art, much
gold was employed. And that this plenty of gold was not a mere figment of
the poet, we know from the best testimony, that of graves. At Mycenae, which
is in Homer called
πολύχρυσος, Dr.
Schliemann has dug up a prodigious quantity of gold, cups and jugs and masks
and ornaments of all sorts. The graves of the Crimea (though these are of
later date) also yield abundance of gold; the corpses which are discovered
in them being covered from head to foot with gold, beaten into the shape of
animals, rosettes, and designs of all kinds. The use of gold as a
concomitant of luxury for personal decoration was associated specially by
the Greeks with the wealthy nations of Asia Minor, such as the Lydians and
Phrygians, from which notion arose the story of Midas the Phrygian, who
turned everything he touched into gold, and the belief that the wealth of
the Pelopid princes of Southern Greece was brought by them from their native
Phrygia. In the use of gold, the wealthy Ionians of Asia Minor copied these
neighbours, even binding their hair with it, in which custom the Athenians
are said to have followed them (
Thuc. 1.6).
There can be no question that to the smiths of early time gold must have been
the metal which gave most scope for the artistic faculty. Its extreme
softness and malleability enabled even workmen who had no more elaborate
tools than a hammer and nails, to work it into any given shape. All the
vessels of Mycenae are thus hammered out and joined into shape by nails, and
the earliest statues of the gods were produced by the same method, which was
called by the ancients
σφυρηλατεῖν. They
did indeed sometimes, instead of
[p. 1.261]welding two
surfaces of gold together, unite them by a solder of borax (Schliemann's
Mycenae, p. 231), but practically this
process was unusual. Casting in hollow moulds belongs to a later period.
In the preparation of gold, the ancients used only the simplest processes of
melting and refining. When gold occurred mixed with silver [
ELECTRUM], they frequently did not separate
the silver, but treated the mixed as a simple metal.
Asia was the source of gold, from the days when the Argonauts sailed to
Colchis in search of the golden fleece, to the days when Alexander and his
captains seized and dispersed the enormous hoards, laid up during many
generations by the Babylonian kings and their Persian successors. Arrian and
Diodorus give us accounts which might well seem fabulous of the quantities
of gold seized in the great cities of Asia. According to Diodorus (
17.71) in the city of Persepolis alone, Alexander
captured a treasure in gold and silver of 120,000 talents. The wealth in
gold of Croesus is testified by his gift to Delphi (
Hdt.
1.50) of above 100 solid bricks of the metal. A private
individual, Pythius, in the reign of Xerxes, possessed three millions of
gold Darics (
Hdt. 7.27). The sources whence the
gold of Asia was drawn were various: India was one of the chief, the north
part of that country paying tribute to the Persian king. In Arabia also
abundant gold was found and freely exported (Strabo, 16.3, 4). Lydia
supplied great quantities of river-gold, both pure and mixed with silver
[
ELECTRUM]. But the
richest source of all in the opinion of the ancients was the country of the
Arimaspi, where the gold was guarded by griffins, and with difficulty won
from them by the hardy natives. Most modern writers suppose that the reality
which gave rise to this fable was the gold mines of the Caucasus, whence
gold penetrated through the country of the Scythians to Persia. A similar
story was told or invented in regard to the Indian gold (
Hdt. 3.102), namely, that it was found in a
country infested by huge ants (
μύρμηκες),
from whose pursuit men could only escape when riding on swift camels. The
motive of these stories for deterring adventurers is very manifest.
The gold mines of Europe were also important. The Carthaginians, and after
them the Romans, obtained their main supply from Spain, in the rivers of
which country was a rich deposit of gold, notably in the Tagus. Both in Gaul
and in Spain, at the time of the Roman conquests, whole districts were
covered with rich auriferous deposits, yielding nuggets to the inhabitants
on the application of the simplest systems of washing. In the provinces of
Asturia and Lusitania, according to Pliny (
Plin.
Nat. 33.78), the workmen went through the laborious process of
undermining whole hills by their excavations, and then turning on rivers to
wash the fallen earth and separate the particles of metal. Gold was also
found in the Italian Padus, in the Hebrus in Thrace, and other rivers.
Polybius states (34.10) that in his time great quantities of gold were found
on the surface of the ground in Pannonia. In Greece proper gold was found in
small quantities in the islands of Siphnos and Thasos, and in larger
quantities in the mountains of Thrace. These last, however, seem not to have
yielded their full supply until they fell into the hands of Philip of
Macedon, who procured from them, it is said, 1000 talents a year (
Diod. 16.8),--in fact such large stocks of gold as
to alter completely the degree of its rarity in Greece. In earlier days the
metal had been decidedly rare in Hellas and Sicily. When the Laconians
wished to procure gold to gild a votive statue of Apollo, they had to apply
to Croesus for it (
Hdt. 1.69), and Hiero I. of
Syracuse had much difficulty in procuring gold for a votive offering to
Delphi of a gold Victory and tripod (
Athen.
6.232). But in course of commerce this poverty disappeared,
and gold was poured into Greece in still increasing quantities, until the
overflowings of Macedonian wealth made it comparatively common. It was then
again used as in pre-historic days for the vessels and ornaments of the
rich. It also became a custom for cities to bestow crowns of gold of great
weight and value upon their benefactors, and even sometimes to set up their
statues in gold. The horns of oxen offered in sacrifice were gilt, both in
Greece and Rome.
Diodorus informs us (3.12) that in Upper Egypt, on the confines of Aethiopia,
were gold mines which were worked from the time of the early kings of Egypt
onwards for the benefit of the state. But here the gold was not found as
elsewhere on the surface of the ground, but extracted from the heart of the
mountains by a number of miserable slaves. Diodorus describes the process,
which appears to be that of extracting gold from quartz. The stone, he says,
which contained the metal was softened by fire, and then detached in masses
by wedges of iron. These masses were brayed in stone mortars and ground to
the fineness of sand. Finally, the gold was detached by washing, the workmen
aiding the process with their hands and with fine sponges. The metal was
purified by being placed, together with a certain quantity of lead, salt,
tin and bran, in jars hermetically sealed, and exposed for five days to the
heat of a fire, after which time the foreign substances were found to have
evaporated.
In his 33rd book, Pliny traces the history of the use of gold in Rome from
earliest times. He says (100.5) that when the Gauls sacked the city, no more
than 1000 pounds' weight of gold could be found in it for ransom. The stock
of gold in the treasury had increased seven years before the Third Punic War
to 17,410 pounds; and after the successful termination of that war, the
metal came into commoner use for decoration, as for covering ceilings and
walls, as well as for vessels. The custom of wearing gold rings was so late
in Rome, that even Marius wore one of iron. The great influx of the metal
and its use for all purposes of luxury dated in Rome as in Greece from the
time of Oriental conquest. For ancient testimonies as to gold mines see
Sabatier,
Production de l'or, de l'argent et du cuivre chez les
anciens.
Gold as coin.--In many parts of the East and in Egypt, gold
wedges and rings of fixed weight passed as currency before the invention of
coins properly so called. The earliest gold coins, which however belong to a
later date than the Lydian and Milesian electrum, were issued by Phocaea
[
PONDERA]. For a long
period,
[p. 1.262]beginning with the reign of Darius
Hystaspis, the gold coinage of the world consisted almost exclusively of the
Persian Darics (
q. v.), which not only circulated
throughout Asia, but came over to Europe in large quantities, and were laid
up in the treasuries of Greek cities. About B.C. 400, Syracuse and other
Sicilian cities began to issue small coins of gold, but the earliest Greek
coinage of any importance in this metal was that of Philip of Macedon. The
gold pieces of Philip and Alexander were issued in enormous quantities, both
during the lives and after the deaths of those monarchs. The Philippi
circulated in Hellas, Italy, and the West, where they became the prototypes
of the abundant gold coinages of Gaul and Britain (Evans,
Coinage of
the ancient Britons). The Alexandri, on the other hand,
succeeded the Darics in Asia, and continued for many years to furnish the
bulk of the gold circulation of the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kingdoms.
Contemporary, however, with them, during the life of Alexander, were issues
of gold by Athens, Rhodes, Cius, Panticapaeum, and other wealthy cities,
which minted in their own names; and after the death of Alexander these
coins gradually gave way to the gold money issued by the Macedonian kings of
the East, especially the very wealthy Ptolemaic princes.
Aristophanes appears to speak of an issue of gold money at Athens, about the
year B.C. 407 (
Ran. 719). We say “appears,”
because it is not impossible that the poet may be using the term
χρυσίον generally for “money,” and
here may even apply it to copper coin. But it is probable that the gold
coins of Athens which have come down to us, which are numerous and of all
denominations, belong to a later period, not earlier than the middle of the
4th century. At Rome gold was used in making payments as early as the 4th
century B.C., but it was kept only in bars, the
adulteration of which was punished by a law of Sulla. Gold coin proper was
first issued at Rome in B.C. 217, but never in Republican times, except on
the occasion of military expeditions. (Mommsen,
Gesch. des
Röm. Münzw. pp. 400-408.)
The Greeks, when they speak of
χρυσίον,
quite as often mean coin of electrum (
q. v.) as of
pure gold: which is intended, must in each case be judged by the context.
Gold coin among the ancients, unless intended to pass as electrum, was
usually very pure. The gold pieces of Alexander and Philip are almost
without alloy; and Augustus, in his monetary reforms, fixed the margin of
alloy, under severe penalties, at 002. It is only among barbarous peoples
that we find gold, the true measure of value in nearly all countries,
debased. Thus in Gaul gold rapidly deteriorated, as it was copied from tribe
to tribe, and the kings of Bosphorus, who continued in Roman times to issue
their own gold, continually debased it until it was finally no better than
copper gilt. (Lenormant,
La Monnaie dans
l'Antiquité, i. pp. 187-205.)
[
P.G]
