32 
southern Italy in their hands. They had driven out Pyrrhus, who 
had come to the aid of the Tarentines, and had taken their city; 
they had reduced the Samnites, Bruttians, and Locrians, and from 
these regions, much richer than Latium, they had derived an 
increase of wealth, of which the introduction of a silver coinage 
was the natural result. Nothing was indigenous in art at Pome, 
and there are only two sources to which we can look for its origin, 
Etruria and Greece. Now Etruria seems to be excluded in this 
case, by the circumstance, that only one Etruscan state, that of 
Populonia on the sea coast, opposite to Elba, is known to have 
coined silver, and its type is very different from that of Boman 
denarii, one side being plain. On the other hand the Greek 
colonists of Magna Grsecia and Sicily had long been in possession 
of a silver coinage, and the Homan denarius and the Attic drachma 
were so nearly of equal value that the Greek historians of Pome 
use them as synonymous. As is the form of eis in the Tarentine 
and Sicilian dialect of Greek. The pure Greek word for coin is 
Nomisma , but the Tarentines called it Noummos , whence the Latin 
JSfumus. The female helmeted head, which appears on the earliest 
denarii, also resembles that on the coins of some of the towns of 
Southern Italy. 
It is impossible to say what is the age of the earliest silver 
denarius now to be found in cabinets; but a progress in their 
execution and type can be clearly traced. The oldest have on the 
one side a female head with a helmet, the crest of which is jagged; 
on the other side the two Dioscuri on horseback, their lances in 
rest, their mantles streaming in the wind, a sailor’s cap on their 
heads, and above them the stars, the emblems of the “ Eratres 
Ilelence lucida siclera.” Next in antiquity to these appear to be the 
denarii with a similar head on the obverse, and on the reverse 
Victory in a big a. The mythical appearance of Castor and Pollux, 
fighting for the Bomans at the Lake Begillus, might account for 
their selection, but at Pome they seem to have had some special 
connection with money. Their temple in the Forum was the 
Boman Bourse, the resort of the money lenders. The only inscrip¬ 
tion on these earliest denarii is Boma, and hence the head has been 
supposed to be a personification of the city; but it is generally 
found on the reverse, and not accompanying the head, and therefore 
probably indicates Pome as issuer of the coin. The denarii with a 
biga and quadriga, from their superior purity and weight, were 
valued more than those of later coinage. Tacitus (Germ. 5) 
