Ancient Greece had a strange system of valuing currency for centuries. In Homer's "The Odyssey", Homer referred to the ox as a unit of account, and it had been for hundreds of years. For instance, a skillful woman's output may be worth that of "four oxen". However, these references are to a standard of value, not a medium of exchange. It would be ridiculously unwieldy to trade oxen for everything one were to buy. A person would, instead, suggest that they would like to "pay bronze to the value of twenty oxen" for a product or service.
Another really crazy part about Greek account is that metals were valued by capacity and not weight because there were no facilities to weigh metal until around 6 or 7 hundred B.C. Greece, with its rapid advances in politics and art seemed to regress when it comes to finances compared to many other nearby civilizations. Minoan Crete had even developed a sophisticated system of coinage while Greece was trading volumes of gold in oxen.
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