In an oration of Isocrates an operation is described which bears some resemblance to that performed by modern bills of exchange.  A stranger who brought grain to Athens, and who, we may suppose, wished to purchase goods to a greater amount than the sale of his grain would produce, drew on a person living in some town on the Euxine, to which the Athenians were in the habit of trading.  The Athenian merchant took this draft; but not till a banker in Athens had become responsible for its due payment.

The Athenian merchants were obliged, from the nature of trade in those ancient times, to be constantly travelling from one spot to another; either to visit celebrated fairs, or places where they hoped to carry on an advantageous speculation.  We shall afterwards notice more particularly the Macedonian merchant mentioned by Ptolemy the Geographer, who sent his clerks to the very borders of China; and from other authorities we learn that the Greek merchants were accurately informed respecting the interior parts of Germany, and the course of most of the principal rivers in that country.  The trade in aromatics, paints, cosmetics, &c., was chiefly possessed by the Athenians, who had large and numerous markets in Athens for the sale of these articles.  Even in the time of Hippocrates, some of the spices of India were common in the Peloponnesus and Attica; and there is every reason to believe that most of these articles were introduced into Greece in consequence of the journeys of their merchants to some places of depot, to which they were brought from the East.

We have already mentioned that the importation of corn into a country so unfertile as Attica, was a subject of the greatest moment, and to which the care and laws of the republic were most particularly directed.  There were magistrates, whose sole business and duty it was to lay in corn for the use of the city; and other magistrates who regulated its price, and fixed also the assize of bread.  In the Piraeus there were officers, the chief part of whose duty it was to take care that two parts at least of all the corn brought into the port should be carried to the city.  Lysias, in his oration against the corn merchants, gives a curious account of the means employed, by them to raise its price, very similar to the rumours by which the same effect is often produced at present:  an embargo, or prohibition of exporting it, by foreigners, an approaching war, or the capture or loss of the vessels laden with it, seem to have been the most prevalent rumours.  Sicily, Egypt, and the Crimea were the countries which principally supplied Attica with this necessary article.  As the voyage from Sicily was the shortest, as well as exposed to the least danger, the arrival of vessels with corn from this island always reduced the price; but there does not appear to have been nearly such quantities brought either from it or Egypt, as from the Crimea.  The Athenians, therefore, encouraged by every possible means their