Danake

The danake or danace (Greek: δανάκη) was a small silver coin of the Persian Empire (Old Persian dânake), equivalent to the Greek obol and circulated among the eastern Greeks. Later it was used by the Greeks in other metals. The 2nd-century grammarian Julius Pollux gives the name as danikê or danakê or danikon and says that it was a Persian coin, but by Pollux's time this was an anachronism.

The term as used by archaeologists is vague in regard to denomination. A single coin buried with the dead and made of silver or gold is often referred to as a danake and presumed to be a form of Charon's obol. Numismatists have also found the danake an elusive coin to identify, speculating that the Greeks used the term loosely for a demonetized coin of foreign origin.

In Persia, the danake was originally a unit of weight for bulk silver, representing one-eighth of a shekel (1.05 gm). This use of the word became obsolete. In the Hellenistic period and later it designated the silver Attic obol, which originally represented the sixth part of a drachma; in New Persian dâng means "one sixth".

The danake is one of the coins that served as the so-called Charon's obol, which was placed on or in a dead person's mouth to pay the ferryman who conveyed souls across the river that divided the world of the living from the world of the dead. Charon's obol is sometimes specifically called a naulum (Greek ναῦλον, "boat fare"). The Christian-era lexicographer Hesychius gives "the obol for the dead" as one of the meanings of δανάκη, and the Suda defines the danake as a coin traditionally buried with the dead for paying the ferryman to cross the Acheron. In literary sources, the smallness of the denomination was taken as a reminder that death is an equalizer of rich and poor.

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