Long before Athens had walls or ships, the earth beneath Greece was already under great stress and pressure.

For 50 million years, the African tectonic plate pressed northward, sliding beneath the Aegean, grinding stone against stone until solid rock cracked and melted under the stress. Deep within the earth, metals were loosened and carried upward by unseen currents.

Eventually, just southeast of Athens near a fishing village called “Lavrion” the land cracked just enough to reveal it’s gift ... silver!

The introduction of the Athenian Tetradrachm (the "Owl") stands as a watershed moment in human history. 

Although it was not the first coinage (that honor may go to the nearby Lydians), it earned international respect for its quality and uniformity.

Whether traded at home or deep within the Persian Empire, it was trusted as a medium of exchange. In it’s travels it also announced the growing power of a tiny but ambitious city-state known as Athens.

But why make them from silver? Why not bronze, gold, or iron?

In The Iliad and Odyssey, Homer offers insight into the use of silver prior to the Greek Dark Ages*. Silver was often used to elevate everyday objects into luxury items such as cups and bowls, inlays on sword hilts, and, of course, jewelry. This aligns with what we know about the extraction and smelting technologies of the time, which were well suited to working silver from ore. Indeed, silver was used for rings and bracelets in Greece as early as 3000 BC.

Through its use in jewelry and other high value items, silver became an established luxury item, and with that came a certain gravitas and shared perception of its value. It’s transition to a trade item became the logical next step. Tributes, ransoms, and exchanges were conducted using silver items such as jewelry and bowls. The problem, of course, was practicality; every transaction required weighing the silver, and what if you only needed half a sword hilt to settle a debt? (awkward!)

Coins provided a medium of exchange that was independent of both the craftsmanship costs tied to luxury objects and the ever-present disputes over their artistic and functional value.

In short; coins made trade easy and helped economies grow. But without a trusted metal backing them up, they would not have been trusted. So when the Athenian Owl came along with it’s high quality silver, it truly changed the world.

* The Greek Dark Ages lasted from 1200 BC to 700 BC. During this time even the written language disappeared from use. For all that time story tellers such as Homer had to memorize his epic poems and relay them orally to the next generation. You can read more about art from this era on our Art History page: Geometric period).

The easy to work metal became the material of choice for the growing Athenian jewelry industry. Wearing silver was a way to show wealth to one’s neighbors, and power to potential friends and foes throughout the Mediterranean.

Fibulae were typically made of bronze, but also crafted in silver to display status. They were used to fasten cloaks and later evolved into the modern-day brooch. This brooch can be found at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The AI image was generated to visualize it’s use.

Homer mentions silver in deliberate and symbolic ways, often as a marker of civilization, order, and legitimate wealth.

One example appears when Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, journeys to Sparta to consult King Menelaus for help and advice. While there, the king presented him with a silver krater to formalize a sacred relationship between the royal households, a bond of recognition within the civilized world.

In Homeric society, worked silver vessels played a symbolic role: valuable, durable, and unmistakably elite, yet neither vulgar nor transactional.

A krator was essentially a mixing bowl. This one was made in Sterling Silver in the repoussé technique. This one is from the Hellenistic period and can be found at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The ancients valued metals in more than just material and economic terms; metals also carried cosmic associations. For instance, gold was linked to the sun and silver to the moon. 

Silver was also associated with distance, purity, clarity, and restraint. In comparative terms, it favored reflection over radiance, and precision over abundance. 

Artemis (shown here) was the patron goddess of silver, the moon, hunting, the wilderness and childbirth. Her bow and its arrows were made from silver to reveal secrets in the darkness and kill quickly without decay.

Large cities had temples for all the major gods so that people could worship as desired. People would reflect on their needs and find the appropriate god’s temple or shrine to pray to.

Many worshiped the patron god of their city (such as Athena in the case of Athens) out of civic allegiance. It was also common to pray for more personal reasons: to Artemis or Hera when expecting a child, to Poseidon before a sea voyage, to Zeus for justice, or to Apollo for truth and clarity.

For Hindus, this idea may sound familiar, as different gods are honored for different purposes. Even in Catholicism, people often pray to God through specific saints—such as St. Christopher for safe travel or St. Jude in desperate circumstances. The notion of directing prayers to a divine specialist, it seems, has endured well into the present day.

Silver’s association with honesty and purity made it an obvious choice as an offering when seeking divine favor. This was especially true when addressing Artemis and Apollo, and it helped ensure their importance throughout Greece. Silver offerings might take the form of cups or bowls, jewelry, figurines, or, later in history, coins.

But what happened to the silver that was left at the altar? Some of it remained at the shrine. If an item was deemed the property of the god being worshiped, it was left untouched. This often included figurines bearing the god’s name or objects tied to the fulfillment of a vow. The remaining offerings were recast and used to support religious infrastructure, maintaining temples, paying priests, and funding sacred feasts and festivals.

In 498 BC the Athenians helped several friendly states rebel against Persian rule. In the process they destroyed the Persian city of Sardis, an offense so shocking to King Darious that for the next 8 years he had a servant whisper in his ear, “Remember the Athenians”.

And so it was that in 490 BC the Persians landed 26 miles Northeast of Athens at a place called Marathon. The Persians brought 25,000 soldiers, the Greeks brought 10,000.

They Persians expected victory. They should not have. 

The Athenians won the battle, but deep down they knew it was not over. The Persians were the wealthiest, most powerful empire on earth and they had been humiliated. They would return.

For the next several years a growing sense of dread spread across Greece. A fear so great that it fractured alliances. City states such as Thessaly, Thebes, Argos and Aegina re-aligned with the Persians rather than face destruction. The Athenians and Spartans held firm but without a strong navy they stood virtually defenseless. After-all, the Persian attack at Marathon demonstrated their ability to land virtually anywhere in Greece (a decisive advantage).

At most, the Greeks had 70 triremes (the fighting ships of their day). This was not enough to patrol the coastline around Athens, let alone the whole of Greece. On top of that, triremes were expensive to build and required large crews of trained rowers. In short; things did not look good for the Greeks. 

But then, in 483 BC an exceptionally rich vein of silver was discovered. The ore was denser, easier to process and plentiful enough to finance the construction of over 200 new triremes.

Much has been said of the Spartan’s stand at Thermopylae, but it was actually a coordinated “combined arms” defense. 

The Athenian navy was nearby at Artemisium, where it prevented the Persians from outflanking the Spartans by sea.

Ultimately the Persians got past the Spartans and went on to burn Athens to the ground. The Athenians themselves had evacuated to the nearby island of Salamis where the decisive battle of the war would occur.

A naval battle that has been compared in importance to Trafalgar and Midway would ensue, and be won decisively by newly built Greek triremes. 

Lacking a navy, the Persians could not resupply their army which was now stranded on the Greek mainland, and in the following summer an army of Greeks led by Sparta faced and defeated the hungry and poorly supplied remains of the Persian army at Plataea.

The importance of silver to the Greeks was undeniable. Although the metal was worthless as a weapon, it secured Greek independence. As such, its meaning to the Greeks (and their jewelers) is revered to this day.

Victory over the Persians ushered in an unparalleled period of prosperity. Advances in science, medicine, philosophy, and artistic freedom emerged that still shape our world today.

Ironically: The “Golden” Age was powered by silver. A metal revered by the gods for its purity and divine order (and which the Greeks had in abundance), making for a perfect blend of social intention and financial ability.

Architecture and the arts became expressions of civic confidence and moral order. Nowhere is this clearer than on the Acropolis, where monuments like the Parthenon, Propylaea and Erechtheion transformed a sacred hill into a statement of Athenian leadership.

The same ideals shaped sculpture, pottery, metalwork, and jewelry. In public theaters, drama fused art, religion, and politics, forcing citizens to confront questions of power, justice, and fate. Balance and social justice were the ideal, silver and marble were the medium.

Of all things, the Athenian navy is most often credited as a source for the world’s first democracy.

The abundance of silver meant ships could be constructed, equipped, and launched at scale. But once in the water, a new problem emerged: thousands of rowers were needed to propel the fleet. These men were not slaves, but citizens who risked their lives at sea, and having done so, demanded a voice in how the city was governed.

Volumes have been written on how democracy “happened” from there, but if silver made victory possible and it stood for justice and social order, one could imagine the people using this belief to influence their path forward. Suffice to say: the people got what they wanted and a democracy was born.

When the Greeks won, they celebrated as a society, but as individuals they often did it with jewelry - such as these two bracelets.

The first has Persian influences: A wrap-around cable bracelet with lion-head caps would have benefited from earlier middle-eastern designs.

The second a bracelet design with filigree applied to a silver base, serpent designs on the sides and a pearl.

These can be found at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

When citizens are given the power to claim ownership of their future, remarkable things can happen. The freedom to create and express becomes a force that pushes a culture forward on all fronts.

It has been said that laws tell us what we can not do, but religions tell us what we should do. Through silver (which served both a religious and financial purpose) we saw this principal at work at a pivotal moment in history.

Speaking of “the people”: It is our view that archaeological treasures belong to the people who created them. Of particular concern are the portions of the Parthenon currently held by the British Museum.

Having witnessed Greek people moved to tears before these works, we can say with confidence that they are not “Elgin’s Marbles,” but part of a culture’s beating heart. We encourage the British Museum to do the right thing and return them to Athens.

Defeating the Persians ignited Greece’s Golden Age, but with no external threat to holding them together, old rivalries between city states resurfaced and peace gave way to discord.

It would take another force to unite the Greeks, a force that came from the North in the form of Philip II of Macedon and his son, Alexander.

We could easily get sidetracked talking about Alexander, but this is the story of silver so we’ll reduce his story to just one sentence:

“Confidence goes a long way.”

On the floor of the house of Faun in Pompeii lies a mosaic depicting Alexander the Great leading a cavalry charge at the battle of Issus. Luigina Rech’s masterful rendition in micro-mosaic is on the right.