It is only in certain texts of poets from the 7th-6th century BC where we find words in Greek which would mean money, much less coinage. In Homer, we find clusters of terms, proceeding from an archaic, even Mycenaean world, and from different semantic fields, which due to material changes, social trends and linguistic dynamics, generally came to mean barter and money. There are excellent studies that attempt to define an inventory of the several ways of expressing acquisition or exchange in Homer. But let us take into consideration a kernel one, buying, expressed in several ways from which we select he bought, whose only object is either women or children, attested with the same sense and specification (women and subdivided children) since Mycenaean times (qi-ri-jato). Laertes (Od.1.430-1) bought (Eurycleia when she was in her first youth) with his own possessions and gave for her the value of twenty cattle. We have here a superposition of standards for barter : bovine cattle and the more general term This last word appears in Homer only as an (instrumental) dative and may accompany the act of acquisition with no other specification, not only expressed by. The form, together with others, which mean different forms of possession proceeds from a root only attested in Greek and Indo-Iranian. There are in Homer many lists of items used for exchange and payment. The games in honour of dead Patroclus afford an extraordinary inventory (II. 23.259 ff.) of valuables offered (almost as in an auction) to the heroes, who do not contend only for prestige but also (v. 709) for. The contests are carefully ranked, the most prestigious being chariot races (contest I), and the trophies are equivalent to this ranking. Other details are added to many of them: measures and weights; equivalence in bovine heads of cattle; their origin, mostly from plundering, and even their history. The situation of gold in this text is quite surprising, appearing only in low positions: the weight of two talents of gold are offered for the fourth place in contest I, and half a talent for the third place in contest III (palaestra). In the lower part of this table, iron is offered: for contest VI (shot put of discus throwing) a rare piece of iron is exhibited: it belongs to Achilles's (cauldron, tripods, horses, mules, cows, women, iron) kept securely off shore in boats and disembarked just for the Games. For contest VII (arch) the trophy consists of iron axes: (v. 850) ten and ten. As in Homer are still only spits used for roasting, the twenty axes and their proportional relation suggest a pre-monetal use. The cluster of words of root, alternates with that formed by and, related in Homer not to "life" but mostly to "means of life" based on agrarian and cattle supplies. The most important and universal is, frequently joined to. Bio-roc may be the minimal sustenance for all people, poor and rich; it is attached to house or palace; it is what Phoenician merchants get in exchange for their goods and take in their boats (0d.15.446, 456). It may alternate with i".avov when meaning "gain", "earning" . But both in Od.2.123, or sometimes Odysseus' possessions might be substituted (v. 205) by an almost isolated newcomer, attested only in the Odyssey: it is, used also to name the presents embarked for Odysseus by the Phaeacians on his journey home, comprising the usual tripods, cauldrons, gold, but now including also clothes. It may not be enough for using a different word, but its future as barter was to displace almost completely what we have seen until now. The extraordinary diversity of goods in Homer is substantially cut down in Hesiod: gold and silver are not in the hands of men, but in those of the gods; on the other hand there is plenty of iron, with no need to import it: Hesiod knows its mining well and its favourable and also terrible effects. The great herds of cattle and horses of the Homeric heroes are no more or exist only in myth. Just an ox and a horse are needed for the cultivation of a Hesiodean plot in a subsistence economy. Consequently the 12T- system is disappearing: appears only once in each of the great poems Theogonia and Opera, always with the adjective "alien" and (36o; seem to maintain an almost pre -Homeric meaning of food supplies, especially cereal kept in granaries, practically the only riches kept jealously by the Hesiodic peasant. The poet advises how to keep PLOc, the minimal unit of possession and survival (0p.601) inside the house, and to prevent robbers (0d.320.605) from stealing them, also called a word that also means the implements for cultivation (0p.407). Hesiod is an inland man; he does not like the sea or sailing. But thanks to the disastrous sailing and commercial experience of his father and through the knowledge provided by oral epics, he feels confident in advising about the sailing seasons or how to handle the exported in the merchant boat (the bigger the boat, the better for . In spite of the apparent meekness of Hesiodic life, he is conscious that he is at the end of the Dark Ages and at the start of an enrichment trend which is expressed in the identification of with the lexicon of "life" (Op. 686). has advanced enormously to displace the systems to become an almost "universal" word. Moreover, we find in Hesiod the singular zp-71..tcx, one of its meanings being "thing", a word non-existent in Homer. More or less the same landscape as in Hesiod may be found in the earliest lyric poets, where also the plural meaning things is found (Archilochus 206a.1, 220, 7th century BC). The change arrives in authors and inscriptions of 7th -6th century BC, when the phenomenon of coinage starts to be reflected in the lexicon. Alcaeus from Lesbos, an island with great dependence on Lydia (Fr.69, cf. 63.7) says that as a sort of political donation It would be the oldest mention of "stater" (but there is myc. ta-te-re). Also, in his Fr. 382.2, for the first time the word vd.., trr..tcx is written. It has been understood in many ways, as "norm, custom, order, legality", etc. but we think that it means "coined money", understanding the two verses as an irony addressed to a prostitute, who is able "to gather an army"... "looking at" or "considering money"; Alcaeus is also the first who uses the word , even when referring to a . It is interesting that Hipponax Ephesius (7th century BC), also from the Asiatic colonies, "demands sixty stateras". The earliest absolute mention of 8pcxxlrtj (but surely a "handful of is meant) would be in an inscription of 7th -6th century BC. in Perachora (not far from Corinth). But authors of the 6th 5th centuries BC, such as Hipponax, mostly live in a world in which coined money is currently attested (as a Lydian invention in Xenophanes B4, (Eretria, 6th century BC).
