Talent (Unit)

The talent was the largest unit of weight and of account used in the ancient Greek world. In the Greek reckoning it equalled 60 minas, or 6,000 drachmas, and it was used to express large quantities of silver or gold such as city revenues, war costs, fines and tribute. No state ever struck a talent as a coin; it was a way of counting and weighing, in the same way that the mina sat between it and the everyday coins.

The word comes from the Greek talanton, connected with the idea of a balance or a weighed load. Through the Gospel parable of the talents, in which a master entrusts sums of money to his servants, the word later passed into English with its modern meaning of a natural ability.

Greeks did not invent the talent. Systems of weight built on sixties were long established in Mesopotamia, where a large unit was divided into 60 minas and each mina into 60 shekels. The same structure, with local variations, appears across the Levant; the shekel is its best-known survivor. In the Homeric poems a talent of gold appears as a prize, though its actual size in that period cannot be fixed.

When Greek communities began striking coins in the 6th century BCE, they fitted the new money into this older framework. The Greek scheme kept 60 minas to the talent but divided the mina into 100 drachmas, each of six obols.

Because each state set its own weights, there was no single talent. The figures below are modern estimates for the two best-known Greek standards, derived from the weights of surviving coins.

The Attic talent became the most widely used after Philip II and Alexander the Great adopted the Attic weight for their coinage, including the gold Macedonian stater. Commercial weights used in markets were not always identical to the coin standard, so ancient sources can quote talents that differ slightly from these figures.

The talent was the natural unit of account for state finance. Thucydides reports that the original assessment of the Delian League, the alliance led by Athens after the Persian Wars, came to 460 talents a year. From 454 BCE the Athenians inscribed on stone the one-sixtieth share of each member's payment dedicated to Athena, and these lists remain a key source for Greek public finance. Building programmes, fleet operations and war indemnities were all expressed in talents.

Payments of this size were made in coin, mostly silver tetradrachms, counted or weighed out in bulk. The talent therefore worked much as a modern large denomination of account does: it summarised a quantity of coin rather than being handed over as a single object. Much of Athens' silver came from the mines at Laurion in Attica, which helped make the city's coinage a widely accepted medium of exchange and store of value around the Aegean.

The talent remained in use as a reckoning unit throughout the Hellenistic kingdoms, appearing in the accounts of Ptolemaic Egypt and the Seleucid empire. In Ptolemaic Egypt, where bronze coinage became dominant, sums were often reckoned in bronze drachmas and talents, so a talent there could mean a far smaller value than a talent of silver. After Rome absorbed the eastern Mediterranean, Greek-speaking provinces continued to reckon in talents and drachmas alongside the Roman denarius, and the term survived in literature long after it ceased to be a practical unit.

The talent shows how ancient money combined weighed metal with counted coin. Early coins were valued largely by their weight in precious metal, so a unit of weight could serve directly as a unit of value. Historians use talent figures to compare the resources of ancient states, though converting them into modern money is unreliable because the relative prices of silver, labour and goods were very different from today's. The idea of a large abstract reckoning unit standing above circulating coins reappears in many later systems, from the Babylonian and biblical talent to medieval money of account described in histories of money.

• American Numismatic Society
• British Museum collection