ὀβολός

Obolós in Greek originally meant a spit or skewer — a long metal rod used for roasting. Before coinage, Greeks used bundles of iron spits as a medium of exchange. Six spits made a handful (drachma, from drassesthai, to grasp). When coins replaced spits around the seventh century BCE, the names stayed: an obol was the small coin, a drachma was the six-obol coin. The money changed material. The vocabulary remembered the metal rods.

The obol was the workingman's coin in classical Athens. A juror received three obols per day of service — a reform introduced by Pericles around 451 BCE to ensure that poor citizens could afford to serve. A loaf of bread cost about one obol. A day's labor for an unskilled worker paid about three obols. The obol measured the floor of the Athenian economy — the minimum cost of participation in civic life.

The most famous use of the obol was in burial practices. Greeks placed an obol in the mouth (or on the eyes) of the dead as payment to Charon, the ferryman who carried souls across the River Styx to the underworld. Without the coin, the soul could not cross and would wander the riverbank forever. The smallest coin in the economy was the price of passage from life to death. Archaeologists have found coins in the mouths of Greek and Roman burials across the Mediterranean.

The word entered English as 'obol' or 'obolus' and remains in numismatic vocabulary. The practice of Charon's obol persisted into Byzantine and even modern Greek folk tradition. Some Greek-speaking communities placed coins on the dead into the twentieth century. The iron spit became a silver coin became a burial custom. The smallest denomination carried the largest freight.