Obol

The obol (Greek obolos) was a small coin and unit of value in ancient Greece, worth one-sixth of a drachma. It was the typical small change of the classical Greek world, used for market purchases and for the daily allowances that Athens paid to citizens for public service. Obols were first struck in silver and, in many states from the later 5th and 4th centuries BCE onwards, increasingly in bronze.

The name means a spit or skewer. Before coinage, iron and bronze roasting spits were used in parts of Greece as objects of value and dedication, and a handful of six spits was later linked to the word drachma, meaning a handful. Bundles of spits found at sanctuaries such as the Argive Heraion are often cited in support of this connection, though the precise path from spits to coins is debated.

On the Attic standard used at Athens, with a drachm of about 4.3 g, a silver obol weighed roughly 0.7 g, a tiny coin around a centimetre across. Other states followed different standards, so obols from Aegina, Corinth or the cities of Asia Minor were heavier or lighter. The six-obol drachma was common across many standards, while Corinth was unusual in dividing its stater into three drachms.

Athens and other mints struck a range of multiples and fractions:

• the triobol or hemidrachm (three obols) and the diobol (two obols);
• the hemiobol (half obol), along with three-quarter and quarter obols, the last known as the tetartemorion;
• bronze units below the obol; at Athens the obol was reckoned at eight bronze chalkoi.

The smallest silver fractions weighed only a fraction of a gram, which made them awkward to handle. Ancient comedy jokes about Athenians carrying small coins in their mouths, and the gradual shift to bronze for small values solved the practical problem. Small bronze coins such as the lepton later filled the lowest tier of Greek currency.

The obol was the unit in which ordinary Athenians met money. Pay for jury service was set at two obols a day under Pericles and raised to three obols in the 420s BCE; an allowance for attending the Assembly, introduced in the 390s BCE, began at one obol and was raised in stages. Building accounts suggest that a skilled worker earned around six obols, or one drachma, a day in the late 5th century. Such figures show that the obol was a meaningful but modest sum, suited to food, small goods and fees.

Because the obol was so widely used, it became a basic unit of account for small transactions, sitting at the bottom of a ladder that rose through the drachma and the mina to the talent.

Greek literature describes the custom of placing a coin with the dead to pay Charon, the ferryman of the underworld. Archaeological finds show that coins were indeed sometimes placed in or near the mouth of the deceased, though the practice was far from universal and the coin was not always an obol. The custom continued in various forms into the Roman period.

Obols continued to be issued by Hellenistic kings and Greek cities, often in bronze, and remained part of Greek reckoning under Roman rule, where they circulated alongside Roman coins such as the as. Similar divisions of the drachm into six obols carried over into later eastern coinages such as the Parthian drachm. The name was revived in the 19th century for copper coins of the Ionian Islands under British protection, and the word survives in several European languages for a small contribution or token sum. The obol is a clear example of how ancient coinage developed a full set of small denominations to serve everyday exchange.

• American Numismatic Society
• British Museum collection