er 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
national cultures of Italy gradually perished to enrich a single
people. While the historian may not attempt to follow out the great
course of events into the infinite multiplicity of individual detail,
he does not overstep his province when, laying hold of detached
fragments of scattered tradition, he indicates the most important
changes which during this epoch took place in the national life of
Italy. That in such an inquiry the life of Rome becomes still more
prominent than in the earlier epoch, is not merely the result of the
accidental blanks of our tradit