ABSTRACT

Bankers in antiquity used both scales and touchstones for money changing, to assess the value of the many different coins circulating throughout the Aegean world. Some of the semantic processes that transformed basanos, Greek word, as touchstone into the term for legal torture can be seen in the use of the term in the Oedipus Coloneus. This tragedy is only obliquely concerned with the process of democracy, with the new institutions of the mid-fifth century which mediated between the city's aristocratic past and its democratic present. Aristophanes refers to the basanos explicitly in his comedies, in a manner that anticipates the direct and matter-of-fact discussion of basanos as torture in many legal texts. The basanos, an imaginary tool for the testing of friendship, loyalty, and adherence to traditional values, provides a central metaphor for Theognis's verse. The poet himself passes the test of the touchstone.