[534] These talents cannot have been Attic talents; for the Attic talent first arose from the debasement of the Athenian money-standard by Solon, which did not occur until a generation after the voyage of Kôlæus. They may have been either Euboic or Æginæan talents; probably the former, seeing that the case belongs to the island of Samos. Sixty Euboic talents would be about equivalent to the sum stated in the text. For the proportion of the various Greek monetary scales, see above, vol. ii, part 2, ch. iv, p. 425 and ch. xii, p. 171 in the present volume. To the lucky accident of this enormous vase and the inscription doubtless attached to it, which Herodotus saw in the Hêræon at Samos, and to the impression which such miraculous enrichment made upon his imagination,—we are indebted for our knowledge of the precise period at which the secret of Phenician commerce at Tartêssus first became known to the Greeks. The voyage of Kôlæus opened to the Greeks of that day a new world hardly less important—regard being had to their previous aggregate of knowledge—than the discovery of America to the Europeans of the last half of the fifteenth century. But Kôlæus did little more than make known the existence of this distant and lucrative region: he cannot be said to have shown the way to it: nor do we find, in spite of the foundation of Kyrênê and Barka, which made the Greeks so much more familiar with the coast of Libya than they had been before, that the route by which he had been carried against his own will was ever deliberately pursued by Greek traders.