the purchase of materials for the construction of the statue, that is of gold and ivory. The gold purchased is described both according to its weight and according to the price (τιμή) paid for it in Attic silver currency (whilst the ivory is only described by the value or price). The sum paid for gold amounted to 526·652 drachms, 5 obols, the weight of the gold being 37·618 drachms: from this we learn that the relative value of gold to silver at that time was as 14:1. According to Thucydides (II. 13), forty talents of gold were used in the making of the statue, whilst according to the more explicit statement of Philochorus the amount was forty-four. The image was dedicated at the great Panathenaic festival of the year 438 B.C. As not more than 10 to 11 talents of gold were used in the three years to which the fragments refer, Köhler draws the inference that the construction of the statue commenced in the same year as that of the Parthenon (447 B.C.), and that Pheidias was engaged on his great work for fully nine years. We thus know now the relative value of silver and gold in Attica about 450 B.C. But we must not regard this as the relation which existed at earlier times. It was only after the Persian wars that Athens had got possession of the island of Thasos with its rich gold mines, and the equally rich districts on the Thracian coast. The fact of her coming into the possession of such wealthy gold-producing regions must have materially lowered the price of gold in Athens. We know how the development of the mines of Pangaeum by Philip of Macedon in the following century lowered the value of gold throughout Greece, for by the time of Alexander the relative value of the two precious metals was as 10:1. In the sixth century B.C. gold was so scarce in Greece that when the Spartans wanted to make a dedication in gold they had to send to Asia to obtain a sufficient supply of the metal[278]. Hence if we conclude that in earlier times the relative value of gold to silver in Greece proper was as 15:1, we shall not be far from the truth. At all events it is put beyond doubt that the relation was higher than that of 13·3:1, and accordingly Dr Hultsch’s theory of the origin of the Aeginetic silver standard, which is based on that relation falls at once to the ground, unless he can shew that such a standard, based on six light gold Babylonian shekels had been previously fixed in Asia or Egypt, and thence adopted by the Greeks without any regard to the relative value existing in Greece itself between the precious metals. But as a matter of fact Dr Hultsch does not make any such attempt. Thus this essay at a solution breaks down.