THE COIN COLLECTOR - World eBook Library

ROME
of the amplified Roman territory, and still more among
the ruder population of the adjoining Italian states
or cities, we can well believe that the old-fashioned
system lingered for a considerable time.
The coinage of bronze of reduced standard survived
the principle on which the Roman gentes or families
struck money with their names and with types indica-
tive of legendary or actual incidents connected with
them, and these only gave wav to the silver series of
denarii and their parts by degrees. The denarius under
the republic was adjusted to the weight of the Greek
drachma, which must have long been a familiar coin at
Rome, and have been accepted in commercial payments
in default of a national silver currency; and the spirit
of the bronze money was maintained in rendering the
new medium in equal measure a vehicle for embodying
and perpetuating traditions of the past and actual
events of the time, while the Romans, among the fruits
of their victories and conquests in Greece, adapted the
types on the new metal, of which they thus acquired an
abundance, to those of their Hellenic subjects or de-
pendents in workmanship and style. The transition
from the ces system to that of the denarius—from a
bronze to a silver standard—was gradual but complete,
and during most part of the republican period we find
only silver and gold employed, the latter very sparingly.
It is supposed that the original denarii, struck in the
third century B.C., are those with the head of Pallas or
Roma, with the numeral X for the value, and on the
reverse the Dioscuri with Roma in the exergue. The
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