Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/400

 requirements of large quantities of bronze for the building of fleet after fleet, and for military equipment, may have very well tended to appreciate the value of bronze at this period. As the reduction in the size of the as continued, though the unit of account was two ounces, under the pressure of the Second Punic war they repeated the same process. The as was now not more than an ounce, so they decreed that the as of currency should again be the as of account, and the state thus gained a half, this time paying ten shillings in the pound.

The ounce and libra had been long well defined at Rome before the silver coinage first appeared, and whilst we saw that the sextula or one-sixth of the uncia was the lowest weight employed for bronze, the fourth part of this weight, the scriptulum, had been regularly employed in weighing silver and gold; as we have seen it owed its origin to the fact that the Aeginetan silver obol was found to be about the weight of the 24th part of an uncia or inch of bronze. The first denarii were the weight of a sextula or 4 scriptula (70 grs.) of the older weight. The scriptulum and sestertius were thus identical, and hence in later days the unit of account was the sestertius and not the as. Accordingly when the gold coinage of 206 was issued, it was based on the scruple, and consisted of pieces of 1, 2, and 3 scruples.

Gold Solidus of Julian II. (the Apostate).

We have now traced the origin of Roman currency sufficiently for the purposes of this work. After various fluctuations in the weight of the gold pieces under Sulla, Pompey, Julius Caesar and others, Constantine the Great finally fixed the weight of the aureus or solidus at 4 scruples in 312, and so it remained until the final downfall of the Empire of the East in 1453. From this famous coin the various mintages of