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 iron rigour with which they were applied, stands alone in antiquity and has been but rarely paralleled even in modern times.

Yet it had also its weak point.  According to a custom, common in all antiquity, but which reached its highest development at Carthage,(44) the Roman government issued along with the good silver -denarii- also -denarii- of copper plated with silver, which had to be accepted like the former and were just a token-money analogous to our paper currency, with compulsory circulation and recourse on the public chest, inasmuch as it also was not entitled to reject the plated pieces.  This was no more an official adulteration of the coinage than our manufacture of paper-money, for they practised the thing quite openly; Marcus Drusus proposed in 663, with the view of gaining the means for his largesses of grain, the sending forth of one plated -denarius- for every seven silver ones issuing fresh from the mint; nevertheless this measure not only offered a dangerous handle to private forgery, but designedly left the public uncertain whether it was receiving silver or token money, and to what total amount the latter was in circulation.  In the embarrassed period of the civil war and of the great financial crisis they seem to have so unduly availed themselves of plating, that a monetary crisis accompanied the financial one, and the quantity of spurious and really worthless pieces rendered dealings extremely insecure.  Accordingly during the Cinnan government an enactment was passed by the praetors and tribunes, primarily by Marcus Marius Gratidianus,(45) for redeeming all the token-money by silver, and for that purpose an assay-office was established.  How far the calling-in was accomplished, tradition has not told us; the coining of token-money itself continued to subsist.