Again, the modern market for ancient coins has been largely restricted to the coast. Because a coin was bought in Smyrna it does not follow that it was found there. Of Sardis itself we still know too little to speak with any assurance[682]. But the absence of finds, even at Sardis, would not be decisive, since on Radet’s theory the Lydian coinage was intended mainly for export, just as appears later to have been the case with the silver tetradrachms of Smyrna, Myrina, Cyme, Lebedos, Magnesia ad Maeandrum and Heraclea Ioniae, which are rarely found near their place of origin, but with few exceptions are brought from different parts of Syria[683]. More serious are the criticisms which do not altogether reject Xenophanes, but explain him away by means of an interpretation of Herodotus I. 94 first put forward by J. P. Six and later developed by Babelon[684]. Six maintained that when Herodotus there states that the Lydians were the first to strike and use coins of gold and silver, the reference is to the concurrent issue of coins in the two separate metals, or, in other words, to the coinage of Croesus (fig. 19. _b_), who is generally admitted to have been the first to give up electrum in favour of separate issues of gold and silver. But though it is true that “coins of gold and silver” cannot mean “coins of electrum,” it by no means follows that Herodotus is referring to the beginnings not of coinage but of bimetallism. Babelon is right in insisting on the exact words used by Herodotus, but in his interpretation of them he takes perhaps too little account of the type of fact usually recorded by the historian. Which is Herodotus more likely to give us? An inaccurate version of a fundamental fact like the invention of coined money? Or a pedantically accurate statement about an experiment in bimetallism that was after all of quite secondary importance? Other things being equal we should surely always prefer the interpretation which gives us the former, and there is nothing to prevent us from doing so in the present case. Assume that Xenophanes means what he says and that his statement represents the prevalent tradition, and it is easy to see how Herodotus came to use the precise words that he did.