Their island state was of diminutive proportions; they devoted themselves almost entirely to traffick by sea, their island was an emporium where strangers resorted. In all dealings with the Phoenicians they would have to pay a drawback on their debased coin; for the cunning Phoenician or Ionian was not likely to be beguiled into taking staters of 200 grs. as equivalent to 230 grs. It is plain therefore that when we find divergencies of standard these are not due to mere _degradation_, but to some far more practical consideration, and this will be seen all the more clearly when we shall find that whilst we have divergencies in _silver_ standards, the gold standard which was in use in Greece from Homeric times down to the Roman Conquest remains almost absolutely without variation. But there are other and stronger objections against the Phoenician origin of the Aeginetic standard. Now if we accept the doctrine that the Greeks received their coin-standards across the sea from Asia, the _Aeginetic_ from the Phoenician traders whose commerce lay with Aegina and Peloponnesus, the _Euboic_ on the other hand from Lydia by way of the great Ionian cities on the coast of Asia Minor, we become involved in a serious difficulty. At the time represented in the Homeric Poems, there is not as yet a single Greek colony on the coast of Asia Minor[284]. Miletus, destined to be in after years the Queen of Ionia, and to be one of the greatest centres of Hellenic commerce and culture, is as yet known only as the city of the barbarous-speaking Carians[285]. Yet we find the Greeks represented in these self-same poems as already in possession of a standard for gold identical with the light Babylonian or Lydian gold shekel (130 grs.). But again we find from the same source that the Greeks were already in full commercial intercourse with one Asiatic people, but not a people who could serve as a bridge between Lydia and Euboea. Everywhere in the Homeric Poems we meet the shipmen of Tyre, who are represented as bringing the products of the skilled artists of Sidon, beautiful cloths, and cunningly wrought vessels of silver, articles of jewellery, necklaces[286] set with amber (perhaps brought from the coasts of the Baltic), and now and then as chance arose, kidnapping women and children to sell as slaves in the marts of the Mediterranean[287]. If the Hellenes had got their standard from an Asiatic source, it must have been the heavy gold shekel of 260 grains, which the Phoenicians employed, and consequently the Homeric Talent would have weighed 260 instead of 130 grains, or on the other hand if it be supposed that the Greeks might borrow and use for their own _gold_ a standard used only for _silver_ in Asia, the Homeric Talent ought to have weighed 225 grains, that is the Phoenician silver standard, which, as we have seen, it certainly did not.