Before we begin, here's the historical background:

Homer (born around 8th century BC)

Legendary Greek poet, presumed author of The Iliad and The Odyssey.

Around 750 BC: Lycurgus, Sparta's mythical legislator, is said to have established the Spartan constitution based on military discipline and simplicity.

Numa Pompilius (753-673 BC)

Second king of Rome, famous for giving Rome its first religious and legal institutions.

Dracon, Athenian legislator (7th century BC), famous for his extremely severe laws, hence the term "draconian".

594 BC: Solon becomes legislator in Athens and radically reforms Athenian society, notably by abolishing debt slavery.

The first regular sports games were held in Olympia every four years, bringing together the Greek cities.

Pythagoras (ca. 570-495 BC)

Greek philosopher and mathematician, famous for his theorem on the right-angled triangle.

Xenophanes of Colophon (c. 570-478 BC)

Pre-Socratic philosopher known for his criticism of traditional Greek polytheism.

The Athenians victoriously repelled a Persian invasion, marking a decisive turning point for Greek civilization.

Herodotus (c. 484-425 BC), nicknamed the "father of history", wrote a vast work describing the Persian Wars, including the Greek victory over Xerxes in 480 BC.

Socrates (470-399 BC)

Athenian philosopher famous for his dialectical method and his teaching on ethics and self-knowledge.

Aristophanes (c. 446-386 BC)

Athenian playwright, famous for his satirical comedies such as The Frogs.

Sophocles (5th century BC), in his play Antigone, criticizes money as a source of moral and political corruption, through the tyrant Creon.

Plato (c. 428-348 BC)

Greek philosopher, pupil of Socrates, founder of the Academy, author of The Republic.

Major conflict between Athens and Sparta, ending in defeat for Athens.

431 BC: Athens finances the Peloponnesian War by diluting its gold and silver coins to increase the quantity in circulation, causing inflation.

Xenophon (c. 430-355 BC)

Athenian writer, philosopher and general, disciple of Socrates, author of the Anabasis.

414 BC: Athens begins to lose the Peloponnesian War after a disastrous expedition to Sicily.

405 BC: Aristophanes, in his play The Frogs, explicitly describes the devaluation of the silver drachma and the appearance of inferior bronze coins in Athens, illustrating the principle known today as "Gresham's Law".

404 BC: Athens capitulates after a long siege by Sparta.

Aristotle (384-322 BC)

Major Greek philosopher, student of Plato, founder of the Lyceum, known for his work in logic, biology and political philosophy.

327 BC: Alexander the Great conquers Persepolis and the eastern provinces of the Persian Empire, considerably expanding his empire.

323 BC: Alexander died in Babylon without a clear heir, sparking wars between his generals (diadochi) to divide up the empire.

Archimedes (c. 287-212 BC)

Greek mathematician, physicist and inventor, famous for his discoveries in geometry and mechanics.

196 BC: The Rosetta Stone is engraved during the reign of Pharaoh Ptolemy V, enabling the later deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Rome defeated the Seleucid empire led by Antiochos III, consolidating its influence in Greece and Asia Minor.

The Romans destroyed the Greek city of Corinth, marking the end of Greek political independence and the gradual integration of Greece into the Roman world.

For this section on Antiquity, the fall of Rome and the Middle Ages, we'll start with a section on Greek coins.

The history of coinage in ancient Greece began around 600 BC, when Greek cities quickly adopted the innovation from Lydia in Asia Minor, initially using electrum and later silver. The first Greek coins were minted on the island of Aegina, featuring a sea or land turtle, but it was the Athenian drachma, decorated with Athena and an owl, that became the monetary symbol par excellence from the 5th century BC, largely dominating international trade at the time.

The image below shows a Greek drachma from that period with that famous owl and a figure on the back. It's a tetradrachma, which was larger than a simple drachma.

Each Greek city developed its own relationship with money. In Athens, currency was deeply linked to political and economic power. The famous Athenian decree of the late 5th century BC imposed the exclusive use of Athenian currency in its allied territories, thus reinforcing its economic hegemony. Athens also accumulated large reserves of gold for emergencies, which were kept on the Acropolis, perhaps as a symbol of its economic prudence. By contrast, Sparta, a military city with rigorous values, chose to severely restrict the use of money, forbidding its citizens to possess gold or silver coins. Sparta preferred to use heavy iron bars to discourage foreign trade and maintain social cohesion.

Wars were often financed by currency manipulation. During the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC), Athens resorted to drastic devaluations to pay its troops. Deprived of access to its silver mines by the Spartan occupation of Decelia in 413 BC, Athens had to melt down gold statues to mint new coins in a hurry in 407/406 BC. Then, in 406/405 BC, the state created bronze coins plated with silver, causing a monetary crisis illustrated by Aristophanes, who already evokes what is known today as Gresham's Law: bad money driving out good money. This emergency currency was quickly demonetized after the war to restore confidence in Athenian coinage.

The end of the classical period was marked by the rise of Macedonia under Philip II and his son Alexander the Great, profoundly upsetting the Greek monetary balance. Thanks to the vast gold and silver mines of Mount Pangaeus, Philip II produced an abundance of money to finance his military and political campaigns, establishing a simple and practical gold-silver standard (10:1). His gold staters, celebrating his victory at the Olympic Games, circulated as far as Western Europe, even reaching England. Alexander pursued this monetary policy, widely circulating the Attic drachma during his conquests in the East as far as India. This massive circulation of coins marked the beginning of the Hellenistic era, when the image of sovereigns gradually replaced that of divinities on coins. This innovation enabled generations of Hellenistic monarchs to promote themselves, relegating the traditional gods to a secondary role on the reverse of their coins.

After Alexander's death in 323 BC, his generals divided up his immense empire, establishing dynasties in Egypt (the Ptolemies), Syria (the Seleucids) and elsewhere. These Hellenistic kingdoms adopted a variety of monetary systems: the Ptolemies imposed a closed monetary system to control the circulation of money, preferring to use grain as internal currency to save precious metals for external military expenditure. At the same time, Rhodes became a major trading center before being economically weakened by the Romans, who established Delos as a free port in 167 BC.

The use of money was central to the remuneration of mercenaries. Alexander's soldiers were paid in silver drachmas on a daily basis.

The cavalry, the elite of this highly specialized army, received on average two drachmas a day, an infantryman one drachma, and an ordinary mercenary two-thirds of a drachma, double the wage of a simple worker.

During the Peloponnesian War, considerable sums were also paid to soldiers: over 1,200 talents to put down the Samos revolt and over 2,000 talents to lay siege to Potidea.

By the time this army was fully engaged in Asia Minor, the total cost was around twenty talents per day, or about half a ton of silver, or 120,000 drachmas.

Greek coinage also played an important cultural role, as each city sought to assert its identity by minting its own coins with local or mythological symbols. For example, Heraclius depicted Heracles (Hercules) fighting a lion, while Cyrene showed the famous medicinal plant silphium.

Finally, despite their variety and regional fluctuations, Classical Greek and Hellenistic coinage left a lasting mark on the economic and cultural history of the Mediterranean world, profoundly influencing later monetary systems right up to Rome, which gradually adopted and developed Greek economic concepts to structure its own imperial economy.