Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/372

 Several of them bear stamps, or letters. There can be no doubt that these are pieces of short bars of bronze, which were afterwards cut up, as occasion demanded. The imprints on them prove them to be of comparatively recent date. If therefore the asses still retained their bar shape after the art of stamping metal to serve as currency had come into use, à fortiori the primitive as of Italy must certainly have been nothing more than a plain rod or bar of copper, which passed from hand to hand as the obols in Greece, and the bars of iron and copper pass at the present among savages of Africa and Asia. This was what was called by the ancient writers the raw copper (aes rude), as distinguished from ''the stamped copper (aes signatum'') of a later date. The fact that early specimens of aes signatum, such as the decussis, bearing a cow on both obverse and reverse (Fig. 49), were still made in the shape of a bar, is a further proof that such was the original form.

Bronze Decussis.

It will be observed that I can give no positive evidence for. It is quite possible that Plutarch embodies a genuine tradition that the original as and obol were the same. Otherwise like Dionysius of Halicarnassus he would have represented the asses by the value in Greek money of his own time. For he can hardly have supposed that at any time an ox was worth only 100 of the obols of his own time.]