In
Ancient Greece the role today filled by bankers fell to the s ( (), singular , so-called from their use of (), a type of table). Initially active during the 5th century BCE, the provided a variety of services, primarily
money-changing, providing interest-payments on deposited monies, pawnbrokering, acting as
notaries, and the safe-guarding of valuables. The earliest recorded are known to have participated in private enterprise; in the first instance they were greatly reliant on transactions generated by money-changing activity, but they also accepted deposits and made and took payments from individuals.) and
pawnbrokers, who operated in the
marketplace or at festival sites, changing the coinage of foreign merchants into local currency. Many early bankers in Greek city-states belonged to the
metic status. Money-lending was very often an activity for foreigners living as so-called outsiders within society. Trade and commercial activities were deemed wholly unsuited to the status and situation of the
noble élite of society because these activities were allegedly a source of
corruption; instead funds, and accordingly wealth, were obtained primarily by way of militancy, not by way of commerce. The task of keeping the deposited wealth provided to the temple of
Asklepios was often allotted to the or ; or at
Kos to the , who were also the record-keepers of such exchanges. It was an established pattern of behaviour for a banker in
Athens,
Aigina and elsewhere, in the interests of the security of the assets entrusted to him, to have his wife wed his slave after his death, in that the slave had inherited his previous owner's bank upon his death. A
slave named
Pasion, for a time owned by Archestratos and Antisthenes, who were partners of a banking firm in
Peiraieus, was for a time
Athens' most important banker, after his
manumission to the metic class. Pasion operated as a banker from 394 BCE to sometime during the 370s. His establishment was subsequently inherited by his own slave, Phormio. The banker-slave
Hermias, allegedly a
eunuch, was manumitted by the banker
Euboulos, and is attested to have behaved subsequently toward the lands of
Assos and
Atarneus somehow tyrannically. His adopted daughter married
Aristotle, the circumstances of this marriage being arranged by Hermias himself. ==Ancient Roman==