Dating the Drachmas in Solon’s Laws

Abstract

Can the drachmas in the ‘laws of Solon’ be explained as silver weights, used in the Athenian economy as a silver standard before the adoption of coinage in the second half of the sixth century BCE? I believe the answer is a firm no. In this paper I marshal historical, archaeological, numismatic and literary evidence to demonstrate that pre-Peisistratid Athens had an essentially agrarian economy in which local trade was usually denominated in barley, and weighed silver was used only to a limited extent in foreign trade and travel. It was the expanding trade of the Peisistratid era that led to the adoption of coinage, following a well-established Ionian model.