The Money Table
The specialists who tested coin at the trapeza, the table in the agora, went on to take deposits, make loans, and handle payments across cities: bankers. The best part of this business is who was running it. Pasion was brought to Athens as a slave and worked as head clerk for money-changers at the port of Piraeus. Freed around 394 BC as a resident foreigner, he took over the bank and the shield workshop when his masters retired. After giving the city a thousand shields and a trireme, Athens voted to grant citizenship to him and his descendants. His estate at death came to some seventy talents. His wife Archippe knew the business thoroughly, and after his death married his successor Phormion — himself a former slave — and kept the bank running. The most advanced finance of the age was in the hands of people standing outside the system of status. Demosthenes's court speeches even preserve a figure: eleven talents of the bank's deposits were interest-bearing. Litigation records became business records.
The myth, corrected
The word «bank» comes from the Greek trapeza, «table»
English bank runs through French banque and Italian banco / banca to Old High German banc, a bench or table. It is a different family from Greek trapeza. The two are a case of the same idea — a table becoming a money-changer's workbench — arising twice in separate places. Parallel evolution, not etymology.