THE COIN COLLECTOR - World eBook Library

ROME
poses of barter and exchange through the medium of
a bronze or brass coinage, of which the unit was at
iirst a square or oblong cast ingot of twelve ounces {ces
Mbralis), and its multiple, stamped with the head of
Janus or Minerva, a bull, a sheep, a sow, a fowl, or two
fowls feeding, or a shell ; from some of which emblems
we may perhaps infer that the word pecunia is a deriva-
tive from pecus. But the presence of these symbols in
some cases was not merely literal, and is capable of an
explanation on historical or religious grounds, as, for
instance, the sow and the two fowls, of which the latter
may be referable to the sacred birds kept for augury,
and the former to the veneration of the ancient Romans
for an animal which yEneas was said to have seen
bringing forth thirty young on the site where the city
was subsequently built, the number surviving in the
thirty curiae, and by its multiple in the three hundred
gentes. The heaviest and most ancient ingot which
appears to have come down to us was formerly in the
Pembroke collection, and weighed 4 lbs. 9 oz. 11 dwts.
38 grains. It is probably a quincussis ; it bears the
figure of an ox. It is not necessary to assume that the
decussis, or double, mentioned by Akerman as having
on obverse Minerva in a biga, and on reverse the prow
of a galley, belonged to the same period, as its type
shews it to have been of much later date. While the
ces maintained its original standard, it seems to have
served not only as a medium of currency, but as a basis
of fiscal assessment and social distribution in regal
Rome, where the five classes of Servius Tullius were
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