In honor of the Greek referendum, we dispatched a cable to our one-time college roommate, Eliot Cutler, inquiring whether he had a copy of the Parthenon scoop. He promptly sent us an image of the lead story on the fake edition of the New York Times that was issued by the Harvard Lampoon. The undergraduate humor magazine had filched and replaced the outer page of every copy of the Times delivered to the university residence halls on a morning of March 7, 1968. It was so deftly done that students stared at the front page in amazement. For the lead story was that an earthquake had swallowed the Parthenon.

It turns out to be but a farcical foreshadowing of the financial earthquake that has now struck our Hellenic heroes, to whom congratulations are in order following the decision of Greek voters to rebuff the European Union. The Sun has never been of the view that the way forward for Greece — or Europe — was to hang its hat on a fiat currency called the euro, with no link to gold or silver specie. We called in February for the restoration of the drachma. The crisis that has now been precipitated is best seen as an opportunity to get down to basics, as a chance to take radical steps designed to put Greece on the road to greatness.

Our advice would be to look to Herodotus and Thucydides. The former, sometimes called the father of history, wrote of the Lydian king Croesus, who was so rich in gold, and saw the Greeks as possessing a capacity for discernment in knowing what to accept and reject from other nations. Thucydides, historian of the Peloponnesian war, turns out to have been a proprietor of gold mines. He understood the importance of specie and sound money. Mark what currency Greece used during its rise to greatness. It wasn’t the euro or other fiat scrip. It was rather drachma of, primarily, silver, with a fallback to gold. Such specie was the currency of nearly all nations, including our own, that rose to greatness.

A lot of culprits can be found in the story of despoiling the Greek patrimony, including ancient Greece’s own temptation to war and its system of tribute. But it is hard to think of any system more culpable than the fiat money operated in Europe. We understand that we are in a minority in pressing this point. Yet only a week ago Bloomberg News reported that the Greek crisis was igniting a rush in Europe to purchase gold coins. It quoted the U.K. Royal Mint as saying that in June demand from Greek customers for Sovereign gold coins was double the five month average. A Web site called Live Science is reporting on a new analysis theorizing that the Parthenon was a storehouse for silver coins — money that was relied on when Greece was in its glory.

We are informed by a wire from one of our readers, a professor of classics, that it was common in archaic Greece to use temples as storehouses for treasure and metal “cash reserves.” Our reader writes that even the gold statue of Athena by Phidias inside the Parthenon was viewed by Pericles as a store of wealth that could be melted and turn into “cash,” gold coin. In Book 2, Thucydides offers an accounting of these reserves, going so far as to list the weight of gold in plates on the statue of the goddess. This is the book in which Thucydides remarks that “military successes were generally gained by a wise policy and command of money.” So if the Lampoon wanted to make a point, it looks like it knew what it was doing.