Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/224

204 equivalent to one ox. The recognition of these objects aa universal legal representatives of value or in other words as money, as well as the scale of proportion between the large and smaller cattle may be traced back (as the occurrence of both among the Germans especially shows) not merely to the Græco-Italian period, but beyond that even to the epoch of a purely pastoral economy. In Italy, where metal in considerable quantity was everywhere required, especially for agricultural purposes and for armour, but only a few of its provinces themselves produced the requisite metals, copper (aes) very early made its appearance alongside of cattle as a second medium of exchange; indeed the Latins, who were poor in copper, designated valuation itself as "coppering" (aestimatio). This establishment of copper as a general equivalent recognized throughout the whole peninsula, as well as the numeral signs of first necessity as invented by the Italians to be mentioned more particularly below (P. 214), and the Italian duodecimal system, may be regarded as traces of this earliest international intercourse of the Italian peoples while they still had the peninsula to themselves.

We have already indicated generally the nature of the influence exercised by transmarine commerce on the Italians who continued independent. The Sabellian stocks remained almost wholly unaffected by it. They were in possession of only a small and inhospitable belt of coast, and received whatever reached them from foreign nations, the alphabet for instance, only through the medium of the Tuscans or Latins. This circumstance accounts, moreover, for their want of urban development. The intercourse of Tarentum with the Apulians and Messapians appears to have been at this epoch still unimportant. It was otherwise along the west coast. In Campania the Greeks and Italians dwelt peacefully side by side, and in Latium, and still more in Etruria, an extensive and regular exchange of commodities