PAST CRIMEStypes of assault. Many of these may well have been victims of murder, their
bodies thrown down the wells so that the killer could avoid detection.
Another type of crime for which there is much evidence from the Greek
world is forgery. It was the Greeks who first invented coinage in the western
world and this allowed the Greek cities to control trade, and to profit from the
issuing of the currency. They took care to produce pure coins that would
guarantee the flow of trade in their regions. But as soon as coinage began,
counterfeiting started too. Despite the threat of dire punishments, forgers
began to make large profits from the production of fake coins. A good fake
coin mustlook like the real thing, but use far less precious metal in its
construction. There are various ways to do this.
One of the first ways people tried to make false coins was to make a base
metal‘flan’using lead or copper, and cover it with a thin sheet of silver, that
appeared like the real thing. Making a die copied from a real coin, and using it
to strike a fake made from a silverycoloured metal such as tin was also tried.
A base metal coin could be covered with silver foil, but that tended to wear off
very quickly, and such coins were often spotted as it was hard to get the
weight right. So more silver had to be added–thicker foil, or adding a layer of
silver solder, or adding another type of solder which was then sprinkled with
silver dust, that was then melted on under heat.
There are many literary references to counterfeit coins in Greek writings,
proving that it was a common, wellknown occurrence, so much so that an
immoral person could be described as a‘fake coin’, and everyone would
know what that meant.
Counterfeit coins were produced for the local markets, as well as for
foreign trade. The crowded markets of Athens and Corinth would have been
good places to pass off these small value coins, while the faker could get away
with passing larger denominations of coin abroad, where people were less
familiar with the real thing. It is interesting to note that Diogenes, famous for
searching the streets in a hopeless quest to find an honest man, was the son of
a man who was an official coinmaker in the fourth centuryBC. Diogenes’
father was convicted of adulterating the coins with base metals; the shame
forced his son to leave home, and to conduct a lifelong campaign against the
sins of luxury and avarice.^3
Roman laws derived from the Law of the Twelve Tables which were based
on Greek originals; early in the Republican period, a group of patrician
Romans were sent to Greece to study the laws introduced by Solon, the Greek
leader who had repealed the laws of Draco and created a new law code in the
sixth centuryBC. In 450BCthe Romans recorded their findings on ten tablets,