thought that they represented the full weight of the original stater. But this is the weight of many of the archaic coins found at Auriol, near Marseilles, and which date from 450 B.C. It is therefore more reasonable to suppose that the Armorican peoples followed the standard for their small gold pieces, which represents a far earlier borrowing from the Greeks.[1]
To sum up our results, we may, with a fair degree of probability, arrive at the following conclusions, amongst others, from the evidence adduced: (1) That before the time of Pytheas (c. 330 B.C.) there was already trade in tin between Britain and the Continent; (2) that the line along which this trade passed was from the tin region of Britain by way of the Isle of Wight, Armorica, and the city of Corbilo on the Loire, to Narbo and Massalia; (3) at a later period a second route was developed across the Straits of Dover, or by an overland transport on horses to Massalia; (4) when the Romans in the time of Cæsar discovered the short route to the tin islands off the coast of Galicia, the British tin trade almost ceased, so that when Strabo wrote (1-19 A.D.) tin was no longer exported from Britain; (5) the trade was carried on not by the Greeks directly, but by Gaulish traders; (6) that the earliest Greek influences came not directly from Massalia, but from the Greek cities of Northern Spain, whose coinage (and, by implication, their commerce and arts also) penetrated across all South-western Gaul.
- ↑ This gold weight standard was probably native, representing, as did the gold standard of the Greeks and Italians, the value in gold of a cow. The British standard of 84 grains was probably the same in origin, gold being scarcer in Britain.
