Silver Coins of Athens

The city-state of ancient Athens owned rich silver mines that financed its silver coinage, famous around the Greek world for purity and reliability. This coin from the fifth century B.C.E. was a tetradrachm (“four drachmas”), which was the amount that a worker or rower in the Athenian navy earned in four days. The images show Athena, the city-state’s main goddess, and an owl with an olive branch, also symbols of Athena. The style of the images was kept old-fashioned and mostly unchanging so as not to harm the trust that people in foreign lands had in accepting Athenian coins in trade and commerce as a form of international currency. (© C. M. Dixon / Ancient Art & Architecture Collection, Ltd.)