Among the peoples living around or in touch with the Mediterranean basin, it was certainly the Greeks who, stimulated by certain Near Eastern practices, made coinage an institution peculiarly their own, for their non-Greek neighbours – the Etruscans, the Sicels, the Carthaginians, the Phoenicians, the Egyptians – despite preoccupations with trade, adopted coinage in frank imitation of the Greeks only at comparatively late dates. Yet the Greeks themselves do not seem to have regarded the development or, as they would have called it, the invention of coinage as marking either the beginning of a new era of commercial practice, or as the discovery of a new and more conveniently liquid medium in which to store surplus wealth. If they did see it in this way, remarkably little echo of it has come down to us in the literature of the period. The growth of wealth during the seventh and sixth centuries and its evil social and political consequences did indeed receive much comment in the writings of Theognis and Solon and others, but hardly any specific mention is made in this connexion of wealth in the peculiarly concentrated, tangible and portable form of coinage. Herodotus tells the story of the Lydian Pythius who claimed to possess, as explicitly surplus wealth, nearly four million gold Darics (VII.27–9); though the story is dated little more than a generation after the initiation of the Persian imperial coinage by Darius, it is only the scale of his wealth that is seen as remarkable, not the fact that so much was held in coin.