Romans got the Phoenician letters from the Greeks but 
retained a number system that was much more ancient. Wayne 
and Shuster, the comedian team, never fail to get a good laugh 
when they line up a group of ancient Roman cops in togas and 
have them number themselves from left to right, uttering 
Roman numerals.

     This joke demonstrates how the pressure of numbers 
caused men to seek ever more streamlined methods of 
numeration. Before the advent of ordinal, successive, or 
positional numbers, rulers had to count large bodies of soldiery 
by displacement methods. Sometimes they were herded by 
groups into spaces of approximately known area. The method 
of having them march in file and of dropping pebbles into 
containers was another method not unrelated to the abacus 
and the counting board. Eventually the method of the counting