At a glance
- Status
- Ancient & Historical
- Issuing authority
- Hasmonean and Herodian rulers; Roman governors of Judaea
- Jurisdiction
- Judaea and the Greek-speaking eastern Mediterranean
- Period of use
- late 2nd century BCE – 1st century CE (Judaea)
More currencies: Currencies and Monetary Systems
A lepton (plural lepta) was a very small bronze coin of the ancient Greek-speaking world, best known as the coin of the "widow's mite" in the Gospels. The Greek word leptos means "thin" or "small", and lepton was used loosely for the lowest-value coins in circulation rather than for one fixed issue. In the New Testament it refers to the tiny bronze coins that circulated in Judaea in the first centuries BCE and CE.
In modern times the name was revived for a subunit of Greek money: one hundredth of the drachma and, since 2002, the Greek name for the euro cent.
Small change in the Greek world
Greek monetary systems were built on silver units such as the drachma and the obol, with bronze small change spreading from the late fifth and fourth centuries BCE for everyday purchases. The values of the smallest bronze pieces varied from city to city and kingdom to kingdom, and ancient writers used lepton for small change in general. There is therefore no single weight or exchange rate that applies to every lepton.
Lepta in Judaea
Before the Hasmonean dynasty, Judaea used coins of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid kingdoms. The smallest local bronze coins were later struck by the Hasmonean rulers, especially Alexander Jannaeus (103–76 BCE), whose small coins with an anchor and a star or wheel design were produced in very large numbers. Herodian rulers and the Roman prefects and procurators of Judaea, including Pontius Pilate, continued to issue small bronze coins. Many are crudely struck, usually weigh less than two grams and measure roughly 12 to 16 millimetres across. In Hebrew sources the corresponding coin is usually called a prutah.
Coins struck under Jewish authority generally avoided human portraits, reflecting religious objections to images, and used symbols such as anchors, cornucopias, palm branches and ears of barley, along with inscriptions. Silver for larger payments came largely from outside: the Tyrian shekel was the coin expected for the annual Temple tax, and Roman denarii also circulated. During the revolt against Rome in 66–70 CE, Jewish rebels struck their own silver shekels and bronze coins.
The widow's mite
The Gospel of Mark (12:41–44) and the Gospel of Luke (21:1–4) describe a poor widow who puts two lepta into the Temple treasury in Jerusalem. Jesus remarks that she has given more than the wealthy donors, because she gave all she had to live on. Mark explains the amount for readers familiar with Roman money as equal to one quadrans, the smallest Roman coin, worth a quarter of an as. On the Augustan tariff that would make a lepton one 128th of a denarius, although such conversions should be treated as approximate.
English Bible translations, from the King James Version onwards, often render lepton as "mite", which has become a byword for a small but sincere contribution. Collectors commonly use "widow's mite" for the small bronzes of Alexander Jannaeus, although there is no way of knowing which particular coin type the Gospel writers had in mind.
The modern Greek lepton
After Greek independence the modern drachma was introduced in 1832 and divided into 100 lepta. Lepta coins were struck for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, though inflation had made them almost worthless by the late twentieth century. When Greece adopted the euro in 2002, replacing the Greek drachma, lepto (plural lepta) became the Greek word for the euro cent, and it appears on the national side of Greek cent coins.