bly associated with the setting up of two precious metals;
the severe gold crises--as about 600, for instance, when in
consequence of the discovery of the Tauriscan gold-seams(40) gold
as compared with silver fell at once in Italy about 33 1/3 per
cent--exercised at least no direct influence on the silver money
and retail transactions. The nature of the case implied that,
the more transmarine traffic extended, gold the more decidedly
rose from the second place to the first; and that it did so, is
confirmed by the statements as to the balances in the treasury and
as to its transactions; but the government was not thereby induced
to introduce gold into the coinage. The coining of gold attempted
in the exigency of the Hannibalic war(41) had been long allowed
to fall into abeyance; the few gold pieces which Sulla struck as
regent were scarcely more than pieces coined for the occasion
of his triumphal presents. Silver still as before circulated
exclusively as actual money; gold, whether it, as was usual,
circulated in bars or bore the stamp of a foreign or possibly even
of an inland mint, was taken solely by weight. Nevertheless gold
and silver were on a par as means of exchange, and the fraudulent
alloying of gold was treated in law, like the issuing of spurious
silver money, as a monetary offence. They thus obtained the
immense advantage of precluding, in the case of the most important
medium of payment, even the possibility of monetary fraud and
monetary adulteration. Otherwise the coinage was as copious as it
was of exemplary purity. After the silver piece had been reduced
in the Hannibalic war from 1/72 (42) to 1/84 of a pound,(43) it
retained for more than three centuries quite the same weight
and the same quality; no alloying took place. The copper money
became about the beginning of this period quite restricted to
small change, and ceased to be employed as formerly in large
transactions; for this reason the -as- was no longer coined after
perhaps the beginning of the seventh century, and the copper
coinage was confined to the smaller values of a -semis- (1/4 pence)
and under, which could not well be represented in silver.
The sorts of coins were arranged according to a simple principle,
and in the then smallest coin of the ordinary issue--the -quadrans-
(1/8 pence)--carried down to the limit of appreciable value.
It was a monetary system, which, for the judicious principles
on which it was based and for the