Drakhma

“[…] You have a porous sponge, I hope?” I said to the shopkeeper. “Even if you haven’t any beautiful chairs and tables. Clear the gore away. This will help!” I tossed him a drakhma with a lordly air, and he subsided. […] For things lent I cannot possibly take recompense, and the things given were, I am ashamed to say, old and not of value. But give me two drakhmai if you wish, whenever you will, and we will say no more of it.

The stonecutter has simply forgotten to put in the horizontal stroke of the first drakhma sign, as both Oliver p. 29 and Körte p. 136, n. 3 have observed. The price of the victim is, then, three drakhmai, which is the regular price for pigs, the cheapest of sacrificial victims, in the roughly contemporary Marathonian Calendar (IG 112, 1358, passim), and in Aristophanes (Pax 374:[…]).

“Half a drakhma?” Menedemos yelped. “For a feather?” A drakhma a day could feed and house a man and his family—not in any style, but it would put a roof over their heads and keep them from starving. […] At last, elaborately artless, he said, “Oh, I don’t know. A mina a bird sounds about right.” / “A pound of silver? A hundred drakhmai?” As Himilkon had worked to sound casual, Menedemos worked to sound horrified.

So the Athenian citizens residing on the island of Salamis were required to furnish their own fighting gear to the tune of 30 drakhmai, which, as noted earlier, would be the equivalent of a month’s salary. […] The fleet was prepared with great expenditures on the part of both the trierarkhs and the city, with the public treasury giving a drakhma a day to each sailor and furnishing empty ships, sixty swift ships, and forty transport vessels, and for these the best crews.