Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/396

 libral asses, or a decussis; (6) In the Second Punic war when the as was reduced, the denarius was ordered to pass for 16 instead of 10 asses; (7) In spite of this reduction, the denarius continued to be regarded as containing only 10 asses when employed in paying the soldiers.

Considerable numbers of asses and the parts of asses have come down to us, many of them bearing marks of value as before described. There is undoubted evidence of a constant reduction of the as. The question arises, did the reduction take place per saltum or by a gradual process? Mommsen thinks that the as continued to be of libral weight until shortly before 264 and that it was then without any intermediate steps reduced to the triens (4 ounces). Mr Soutzo on the other hand maintains with vigour that from 338, the date at which he fixes the first coinage of asses at Rome, to 264, the degradation was a gradual process, and he arraigns Mommsen on a charge of disregarding the ancient authorities, who state, as we have seen, that the change was from libral to sextantal asses. Mr Soutzo is thus compelled to state that all the asses within that period (338-264 ) although they have a range from almost full libral weight to only 3 ounces were treated as libral asses. Now this of course is a very reasonable hypothesis on the principle which I have adopted that bronze money was in fact merely token currency, used only for local circulation and not for extraneous trade. But Mr Soutzo is precluded from adopting such a position unless he gives up the basis of his whole work. He has laid down that the bronze money was not a mere conventional currency, but always was actual value for the amount which it represented. On this assumption he obtains his relation of 1 : 120 between copper and silver. Assuming that the sextantal reduction was contemporaneous with the issue of the first denarius (which is in direct defiance of the historians), he found that the denarius of 70 grs. = 2 ounces (840 grs.) of bronze; therefore silver was to bronze as 120 : 1. Again, when the financial crisis took place during the Second Punic war and the denarius was reduced (as we learn from the actual coin weights) to 62 grs., and it was made to pass for 16 asses instead of 10 asses, he finds that since 62 grs. of silver = 16 asses of 432 grs. (unciae) silver was to bronze as