neys and coins. Up to this time the different
communities of northern and central Italy, with few exceptions, had
struck only a copper currency; the south Italian towns again
universally had a currency of silver; and there were as many legal
standards and systems of coinage as there were sovereign communities
in Italy. In 485 all these local mints were restricted to the issuing
of small coin; a general standard of currency applicable to all Italy
was introduced, and the coining of the currency was centralized in
Rome; Capua alone continued to retain its own silver coinage struck in
the name of Rome, but after a different standard. The new monetary
system was based on the legal ratio subsisting between the two metals,
as it had long been fixed.(43) The common monetary unit was the piece
of ten -asses- (which were no longer of a pound, but reduced to the
third of a pound), the -denarius-, which weighed in copper 3 1/3 and
in silver 1/72, of a Roman pound, a trifle more than the Attic
--drachma--. At first copper money still predominated in the coinage;
and it is probable that the earliest silver -denarius- was coined
chiefly for Lower Italy and for intercourse with other lands. As the
victory of the Romans over Pyrrhus and Tarentum and the Roman embassy
to Alexandria could not but engage the thoughts of the contemporary
Greek statesman, so the sagacious Greek merchant might well ponder as
he looked on these new Roman drachmae. Their flat, unartistic, and
monotonous stamping appeared poor and insignificant by the side of
the marvellously beautiful contemporary coins of Pyrrhus and the
Siceliots; nevertheless they were by no means, like the barbarian
coins of antiquity, slavishly imitated and unequal in weight and
alloy, but, on the contrary, worthy from the first by their
independent and conscientious execution to be placed on a level
with any Greek coin.

Extension of the Latin Nationality

Thus, when the eye turns from the development of constitutions and
from the national struggles for dominion and for freedom which
agitated Italy, and Rome in particular, from the banishment of the
Tarquinian house to the subjugation of the Samnites and the Italian
Greeks, and rests on those calmer spheres of human existence which
history nevertheless rules and pervades, it everywhere encounters the
reflex influence of the great events, by which the Roman burgesses
burst the bonds of patrician sway, and the rich variety of the