Advancing westward we find the Ossetes of the Caucasus at the present moment employ the cow as their unit of value, the prices of all commodities being stated as one, two, three or four cows, or even at one-tenth or one-hundredth of the value of a cow. The ox is worth two cows, and the cow is worth ten sheep. This people regulate compensation for wounds thus: they measure the length of the wound in barley corns, and for every barley corn which it measures a cow has to be paid[46]. We can have little doubt that over all Hither Asia the same method of employing the cow as the principal unit of value obtained. It is that which we found among the Greeks of the Homeric Poems, who were in full contact with Northern Asia Minor, and was almost certainly that of the Semites who dwelt in the South. Just as we find the buffalo, and the pots, bronze platters, arrows, lances and hoes standing side by side in well defined mutual relation among the Bahnars of Cochin China, so we find in Homer that whilst the cow is the principal unit, the slave is employed as an occasional higher unit, and the kettle (_lebes_), the pot (_tripous_), the axe and the half axe, hides, raw copper and pig iron stand beside the cow as multiples or sub-multiples. When Ajax and Idomeneus make a bet on the issue of the chariot race, the proposed wager is a pot or a kettle[47], whilst from another passage we learn that the usual prizes given at the funeral games of a chieftain were female slaves and pots (Tripods). Passing from Greece into Italy we have no difficulty in proving that the cow was the regular unit of value in that peninsula and the adjacent island of Sicily. Down to 451 B.C. all fines at Rome were paid in cows and sheep. By the Tarpeian Law these were commuted for payments in copper, each cow being set at 100 asses, each sheep at 10 asses. As I shall deal with the whole question of the Roman As at considerable length later on I shall here simply note that the Italian tribes had evidently the same system of adjusting the relations between their cattle and sheep and their metals which we found among the Persians and modern Ossetes. In Sicily it is clear that the cow had played the same part as elsewhere, for we learn from Aristotle[48] that when the tyrant Dionysius burdened the Syracusans by excessive taxation, they ceased in a great degree to keep cattle, inasmuch as the unit of assessment was the cow. If then in the 4th century B.C. at Syracuse, the most advanced community in Sicily, the cow still continued to be the unit of assessment, _à fortiori_, at an earlier period that animal must have been the monetary unit of the whole island.