Aegina, city-state of

Mycenaean art suggests the inference that the Mycenaean culture held its own in Aegina for some generations after the Dorian “conquest” of Argos and Lacedaemon.

It is probable that the island was not doricized before the ninth century BCE.

True coinage, the first in the Western world, comes into being in Lydia around 700 to deal with the extensive and complex trading culture in the Mediterranean and Middle East; the Greeks quickly adopt the concept.

Measured quantities of gold, silver, or copper, melted and cast into regular shapes, are then stamped with marks representing their value and the name or image of the ruler or state as a guarantee of value.

Herodotus states (I, 94) that the Lydians 'were the first to coin in gold and silver'.

Aristotle states that the first coins were struck by Demodike of Kyme, who had married Midas, king of Pessinus, and had by him a son named Agamemnon.

Some archaeological and literary evidences suggest that the Indians invented coinage, somewhere between the sixth and fifth centuries BCE.

However, some numismatists consider coins to have originated around 600-550 BCE in Anatolia, which corresponds to modern-day Turkey, in particular in the Anatolian kingdom of Lydia.

Opponents of the Lydia scenario point to the fact that coins of that era have been totally absent from archaeological finds in Sardis, capital of Lydia.

A coin, by definition, is an object used to facilitate commerce and exchanges.

The proponents of the Lydian Greek coins scenario admit the fact that they were likely not used in commerce or industry.

Electrum coins were not standardized in weight and are considered by opponents as badges, medals or ceremonial objects issued by priests, rather than coins (actually the oldest of them have been discovered not in Lydia, but in an ancient Greek temple of Ephesus in what is now Turkey).

The oldest coins are considered by other numismatists to be the Aegina Chelone coins which were minted around 700-550 BCE, either by the local Aegina people or by Pheidon, king of Argos (who first set the standards of weights and measures).

There is a unique electrum stater of Aegina in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

The date of this coin can hardly be much later than about 700 BCE.

The oldest Aegina Chelone coins depict sea turtles.

Aegina was a colony of Epidaurus, to which state it was originally subject, according to Herodotus.

Its placement between Attica and the Peloponnesus made it a center of trade even earlier, and its earliest inhabitants came from Asia Minor.

Minoan ceramics have been found in contexts of around 2000 BCE.

The discovery in the island of a number of gold ornaments belonging to the latest period of Mycenaean art suggests the inference that the Mycenaean culture held its own in Aegina for some generations after the Dorian conquest of Argos and Lacedaemon.

It is probable that the island was not doricized before the ninth century BCE.

One of the earliest historical facts is its membership in the League of Calauria (Calaurian Amphictyony, circa eighth century BCE), which included, besides Aegina, Athens, the Minyan (Boeotian) Orchomenus, Troezen, Hermione, Nauplia and Prasiae, and was probably an organization of city-states that were still to some degree Mycenaean, for the purpose of suppressing piracy in the Aegean that had arisen as a result of the decay of the naval supremacy of the Mycenaean princes.

The Boeotian cities of Chalkis and Eretria battle on the Lelantine Plain, the natural boundary between them, in the culmination of a mercantile conflict known as the Lelantine War.

Corinth, Samos, and the Thessalian League back Chalkis; Aegina and Miletos (and possibly Megara) back Eretria.

In the final battle, from which the war derives its name, Thessalian cavalry defeat the Eretrian forces.

Indirect evidence in Thucydides points towards a date circa 705 BCE, situating the conflict halfway between history and legend.

As a consequence, Eretria loses control of Andros, Tenos, and Kea islands.

Lefkandi may have been the predecessor of Eretria and abandoned as the result of the victory of Chalkis in the war.

Croesus' relations with Greece are close, and his bimetallic system may owe something to the fact that Greece has itself now produced its first silver coins.

The oldest are of the island of Aegina, with, obverse, a turtle-associated with Aphrodite-and, reverse, an incuse square. (Tradition—e.g., in Julius Pollux, the second-century-CE Greek scholar, and elsewhere—regards these as struck by Pheidon of Argos in virtue of his supremacy over Aegina; but the coins are too late to claim association with him in Aegina. They begin no earlier than the late seventh century, when Aeginetan maritime ascendancy is growing, incidentally spreading the Aeginetan weight standard for coinage, based on a drachma of about six grams, over much of the Peloponnese and also the Aegean, where similar currency is produced in the islands.)

Aegina, inhabited since around 3000 BCE, in Neolithic times, becomes a leading maritime power during the sixth century BCE because of its strategic position, and its silver coins become currency in most of the Dorian states.

The pediment of the Doric temple at the shrine of Aegina’s native goddess Aphaia, constructed around 500, contains marble sculptures of Athena and heroes in combat (now famous as the Aegietan marbles), exemplifying a gradual shift from earlier portrayals of monsters to scenes of fighting.

The temple’s interior columns, which had to reach a greater height than the exterior colonnade, are constructed in two tiers.

The floral acroteria and bold pedimental sculptures are also carved from marble, which sculptors have introduced during the past couple of decades.

Aegina's economic rivalry with Athens has led to wars and to the island's close collaboration with Persia.

Corinth and Athens, both of which have naval outlets in the Saronic Gulf, have a shared interest in containing the power of Aegina, the greatest other power in that gulf, the “star in the Dorian Sea,” as the poet Pindar, who lives from about 520 CE to 438 BCE, is to call Aegina.

Miletus had been alone among the Anatolian Greek cities in choosing the Persian side in the struggle with Lydia.

A number of the others had been subjected to Persian rule by force.

Many of these Greek towns during the ensuing period have maintained a semiautonomous status while recognizing Achaemenian overlordship.

Outside the cities, occupation forces and military colonies preserve law and order.

In 499, however, Histiaeus, the Greek ruler of Miletus, leads a revolt against Persia.

Greek writer Hecataeus of Miletus, who flourishes around 500, is the first known Greek historian; he attempts in vain to dissuade his fellow citizens from rebellion.

The Milesian deputy governor Aristagoras arrives in Athens and Sparta (and perhaps at other places too, such as Argos) asking for help.

Eretria and Athens (but not Sparta, whose King Cleomenes I rejects the Milesian appeal) grant the rebels token aid: Eretria sends five ships and Athens immediately dispatches a fleet of twenty ships—a major undertaking, considering Athens' resources and commitments—but then swiftly withdraws it.

The Athenian-Aeginetan struggle, having begun well back in the late sixth century with a shadowy precursor in the mythical period, means that the Athenian help sent to Ionia is risky and heroic.

This “Ionian revolt”, in which the Greeks kill or expel many of the Persian-installed tyrants, is the opening phase of the Greco-Persian Wars. (Despite the word Ionian, other Asiatic Greeks join in, from the Dorian cities to the south and from the so-called Aeolian cities to the north, and the Carians, not Greeks in the full sense at all, fight among the bravest).

Two royal families hold the kingship of Sparta, whose ruling class has devoted itself to war and diplomacy from the fifth century on, deliberately neglecting the arts, philosophy, and literature, and forging the most powerful army standing in Greece.

Cleomenes, the Agiad king, tries in 491 to punish the Medizers of Aegina for that city's submission to the Persians, but co-king Demaratus again thwarts him.

Cleomenes engineers the deposing of Demaratus on a false charge of illegitimacy by bribing the Delphic oracle, and Demaratus' cousin Leotychidas of the Eurypontid house accedes to the throne.

Cleomenes' deceit is discovered, and he flees to Thessaly.

The Spartans reinstate him, but soon afterwards, he goes insane (it is alleged), is imprisoned, and commits suicide.

The deposed Demaratus has in the meantime fled to Persia and is given some small cities in northwestern Asia Minor (which his descendants will continue to hold in the time of Xenophon, nearly a century later).

Athens' fleet in 489 BCE, though surely bigger than it had been a decade earlier, consists of only seventy ships, of which twenty have been borrowed from Corinth.

The reason Athens has borrowed these (actually it is a sale at nominal charge) is Athens' war, or series of wars, with Aegina, which has caused it to build a fleet.

Following the Athenian victory over the Persians, Miltiades sets out with the fleet in the spring of 489 BCE on an expedition to conquer those islands that had supposedly sided with Persia.

He attempts to conquer the island of Páros, whose government had aided the Persian invaders.

He fails, and on his return to Athens, there is an outcry of indignation, ably exploited by his rivals, the Alcmaeonids.

Miltiades is prosecuted, fined fifty talents and, unable to pay a large fine imposed on him, imprisoned, although the Alcemeonid faction had demanded the death penalty.

He dies shortly thereafter of gangrene from a leg wound sustained during the expedition.

His son Cimon, after arranging the marriage of his sister to the richest man in Athens, is able to discharge the debt.