History of the World/History of the World (Bureau Development, Inc.)(1992).BIN/dp/0211/02111.txt

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$Unique_ID{how02111}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{History Of Monetary Systems
Part II}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Del Mar, Alexander}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{gold
silver
coins
roman
sacred
period
footnote
upon
value
india}
$Date{}
$Log{}
Title:       History Of Monetary Systems
Book:        Chapter II: The Sacred Character Of Gold
Author:      Del Mar, Alexander

Part II

     At this period, according to Pliny, the Roman money was entirely of
bronze.  If this is true, all offerings of money to the temples must have been
in bronze coins.  If the object of conferring a sacerdotal character upon gold
was merely to preserve the ecclesiastical treasure from violation, it is
inexplicable that the same sacred character was not also conferred upon the
current bronze money.  It is far more consistent with the grossly
superstitious character of the age to believe that the Romans (of the period
when this legend was penned) were taught to regard all gold, except such as
was worn upon the person, as sacred; and that the object of pronouncing the
gold in the jewels contributed by the Roman women to be sacred, was to prevent
its ever being again worn as jewelry.  This gold had saved Rome, for although
it is said it was not actually paid to the Gauls, the delay attending the
weighing of it had given time for Camillus to advance to the rescue of the
beleaguered citadel and drive the barbarians away.  There was no less reason
for rendering sacred the gold in the jewels, whose weighing had saved the
city, than the geese whose cackling had contributed to the same happy event.
However, it is possible that, as yet, a sacred character was only attached to
such gold as had been consecrated to the gods.

     The social, servile and civil wars of Rome were characterized by great
disorders of the currency, and during the latter, that is to say, in B. C. 91,
Livius Drusus, a tribune of the people, authorized the coinage of silver
denarii, alloyed with "one-eighth part of copper," which was a lowering of the
long established standard.  As the civil wars continued, a portion of the
silver coinage was still further debased, and the denarius, whose legal value
had long been 16 aces, was lowered to 10 aces.  Later on we hear of the issue
of copper denarii plated to resemble those of silver.  It is possibly to these
debased or plated coins that Sallust alludes when he says that by a law of
Valerius Flaccus, the Interrex, under Sylla (B. C. 86), "argentum aere solutum
est," i. e. silver is now paid with bronze.  Valleius Paterculus explained the
operation of this law differently, in saying that it obliged all creditors to
accept in full payment only a fourth part of what was due them.  These
explanations afford a proof that at this period the gold coins were not sole
legal tenders.  The discontent produced among commercial classes by this law
of Valerius Flaccus, induced the College of Praetors (B. C. 84) to restore the
silver money to its ancient standard by instituting what we would now call a
trial of the pix.  Sylla, enraged at this interference with the coinage and
the political designs connected with it, annulled the decree of the praetors,
proscribed their leader, Marius Gratidianus, as a traitor, and handed him over
to Catiline, by whom he was executed. ^1

[Footnote 1: Modern writers on money have expended a great deal of false
sentiment on Gratidianus.  Cicero, who was his relative and possibly knew him
better, proves him a liar, cheat, demagogue, and traitor (Off., iii., 20.)]

     Sylla's lex nummaria (B. C. 83), which prescribed the punishment of fire
and water, or the mines, to the forgers of gold and silver coins, implies that
at this period the immunity which perhaps previously, and certainly
afterwards, attended gold coins, was not yet secured.  About B. C. 82, Q.
Antonius Balbus, an urban praetor, was authorized by the Senate, then
controlled by the partisans of Marius, to collect the sacred treasure from the
temples and turn it into coins.  This money was employed in the struggle with
Sylla.  It is to this period, doubtless, that Cicero afterwards referred when
he said: "At that time the currency was in such a fluctuating state, that no
man knew what he was worth.' ^2 After Sylla's triumph over Marius, and his
resignation of the dictatorship (B. C. 79), the ancient standard of silver
coinage was restored; and the opulent citizens, in order to express their
approbation of this measure, erected full length statues of the unfortunate
Marius Gratidianus in various parts of Rome.  About B. C. 69, Cicero alluded
to the public treasury as the "sanctius aerarium." This expression, in
connection with the coins struck by Antonius Balbus, from consecrated treasure
and the statues erected to Marius Gratidianus, all point to this period as
that of the adoption of the sacredness of gold in the Roman law.

[Footnote 2: Off., iii., 30.]

     About this time the Jews appear to have again acquired some share in that
lucrative trade with India which they had formerly shared with the Greeks, and
which has ever been a source of contention and hatred among the states of the
Levant.  The principal channel of this trade was now by the Nile and the Red
Sea, and was in the hands of the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt. A portion of it,
however, went overland by Palmyra; and from this portion Jerusalem derived
important commercial advantages.  Such as they were, these advantages were
lost to the Jews and acquired by Rome, when, in B. C. 63, Pompey and Scaurus
snatched Judea from the contentious Maccabees, and established over it a Roman
government. ^1 In B. C. 59 Cicero said: "The Senate, on several different
occasions, but more strictly during my consulship, prohibited the exportation
of gold." (Exportare aurum non oportere cum saepe antea Senatus tum me consule
gravissime judicavit.) ^2 Cicero was consul four years previously, that is to
say, in B. C. 63. "Exportation" here seems to mean transmission from one
province of the Roman empire to another, because elsewhere, in the same
pleading, Cicero says: "Flaccus" (a proconsul of Syria) "by a public edict
prohibited its exportation" (that of gold) "from Asia." The introduction of
the word "Italy" in Cicero's plea for Flaccus, can only be regarded as a means
of enlisting the prejudice of the judges.  Here is the passage in full: "Since
our gold has been annually carried out of Italy and all the Roman provinces by
the Jews, to Jerusalem, Flaccus, by a public edict, prohibited its exportation
from Asia." The Jews probably bought gold (with silver) in the provinces
between Judea and India, because it was cheaper in those places than in
Europe.  They may have bought silver in Greece or Italy, but unless their
commercial pre-eminence is a trait of altogether modern growth, it is hard to
believe that they bought gold in Italy, when it could have been obtained
nearer by, at two-thirds the price.  The penalty which this unlucky people
have paid for their ill-starred attempts to share in the Greek and Roman
profits of the oriental trade has been more than two thousand years of
oppression and ostracism.

[Footnote 1: The Maccabees struck the earliest Jewish coins.  These were
called sicals or shekels, the same name given to coins by the ancient Hindus,
with whom sicca meant a mint, or "minted," or "cut." The Arabians of a later
period also borrowed the same term.]

[Footnote 2: "Orat. pro L. Flacco," c. 28.]

     The conquest of Egypt by Julius Caesar (B. C. 48) threw the whole of the
oriental trade into the hands of Rome.  Canals connecting the Mediterranean
and Red Seas had been constructed successively by Necho, ^1 Darius and
Ptolemy; and shortly after the Julian conquest, one of these canals was used
for the voyages of the Indian fleet. ^2 A century or so later Pliny recorded
the fact that a hundred million sesterces' worth of silver (equal in value to
one million gold aurei) was annually exported to India and China. ^3 The
numerical proportions of the gold and silver ratios in Europe and India
indicate that this trade was not a new one, and that a similar trade had been
conducted by the Ptolemies and by the Babylonians and Assyrians upward to a
remote era of the commercial intercourse between the Eastern and Western
worlds. ^1 During the Ptolemaic period the ratio was 10 for 1 in Europe, and
12 1/2 for 1 in Egypt, whilst it was 6 to 6 1/4 for 1 in the Orient.  In other
words, a ton weight of gold could be bought in India for about 6 1/4 tons of
silver, and coined, in Egypt, into gold pieces worth 12 1/2 tons of silver. ^2
The profit was therefore cent per cent, and even after the Romans conquered
Egypt, the rate of profit on exchanges of Western silver for Eastern gold was
quite or nearly as great.  This explains what seems so abstruse a puzzle to
the industrious but uncommercial Pliny: he could not understand why his
countrymen "always demanded silver and not gold from conquered races." ^3 One
reason was that the Roman government knew where to sell this silver at a
usurer's profit.  When this profit ceased, as it did when the oriental trade
was abandoned, the Roman government entirely altered its policy.  During the
middle ages it preferred to collect its tributes in gold coin.

[Footnote 1: Herodotus, Clio, 202; Eut., 158; Mel., 39.]

[Footnote 2: Strabo.  At a later period the inter-oceanic canal became clogged
with drifting sand, and was reopened by Trajan or Hadrian, probably the
latter.  It was kept open by the Byzantine emperors.  See Marcianus in
Morisotus, "Orbis Martimus," and Anderson's "History Commerce." It was again
reopened by Amrou in A. D. 639, during the reign of the caliph Omar.  The
Ptolemaic (and Roman) route was by Alexandria, the Nile, the Canal, Berenice,
Sabia, and Muscat.  It is fully described in the "Periplus maris erythraei" of
Arrian.]

[Footnote 3: Minimaque computatione millies centena millia sestertium annis
omnibus India et Seres peninsulaque illa imperio nostro adimunt.  Tanto nobis
deliciae et faminae constant ("Nat. History," xii., 18.) In another place
(vi., 23) he puts it at half this sum, "Quingenties I. I. s." for India alone.
The "feminine luxuries" imported in exchange included gold, silk, and spices.
Numbers of the silver cons exported to India at this period have been found
during the present century buried in Budhist topes.]

[Footnote 1: "Hist. Money, Ancient," p. 71.]

[Footnote 2: Lenormant, i., 146-51.]

[Footnote 3: Equidem miror P. R. victis gentibus in tributo argentum
imperitasse non aurum ("Nat. Hist." xxxiii., 15).]

     When the enormous difference in the legal value of the precious metals in
the Occident and Orient is considered, and that, too, at a period when
maritime trade between these regions was not uncommon, it is impossible to
resist the conviction that the superior value of gold in the West was created
by means of legal and, perhaps, also sacerdotal ordinances.  This method of
fixing the ratio may even have originated in the Orient.

     Colebrook ^4 states that the ancient Hindus struck gold coins, which were
multiples of the christnala, the latter containing about 2 1/4 English grains
fine.  According to Queipo, ^1 five christnalas equaled a masha of 11 1/4
grains and 80 christnalas a tola, or suvarna, of 180 grains.  This system
appears to have originated at two different periods, the octonary relations
belonging to the remote period of the Solar worship, and the quinquennial to
the Braminical period.  Dished gold coins (scyphates) of the type afterwards
imitated in the besant, called "ramtenkis," and regarded as sacred money, were
struck in India at a very remote period.  The usual weights were about 180,360
and 720 English grains (1, 2 and 4 tolas).  One example weighed 1,485 grains,
and was probably intended for 8 tolas sicca.  The gold being alloyed with
silver gave a pale appearance to the pieces.  The extant coins contain no
legible dates or inscriptions, and are much worn by repeated kissing.  The
emblems upon them are the sacred ones of Rama, Sita and Hunuman.  They were
evidently held in high veneration by the Bramins.  Facsimiles of these coins
have been published in the "Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal." ^2 In
the Braminical coinages the value of silver seems to have been lowered from 4
(to 5) for 1 gold; and though in later coinages the value of silver was again
lowered, as before stated, to about 6 1/4 for 1 gold, the general tendency in
the Orient was to maintain the value of silver, and in the Occident to raise
that of gold.  So that, although the system of deriving a profit from the
device of altering the ratio was probably of oriental origin, the practical
operation of this system - certainly at the periods embraced within the Greek
and Roman histories - was precisely opposite in the Western world to what it
was in the Eastern.  The governments of Persia, Assyria, Egypt, Greece and
Rome made a profit on the coinage by raising the value of gold, while those of
India, China, and perhaps also Japan, made their profit by maintaining, or
enhancing, the value of silver.  In the last named State silver was valued at
8 (some say at 4) to 1 of gold, at one of which ratios it stood so late as
1858.

[Footnote 4: "Asiat. Researches," London, 1799, v., 91.  Meninsky, in his
"Thesaurus Ling. Orient.," p. 1897, voc. "Choesrewani," says that, in the time
of Chosroes (A. D. 531-79), the Persians worshiped the dirhems of that
monarch.  If we read "venerated" for "worshiped," and "dinars" for "dirhems,"
we shall probably get nearer to the truth.  Chosroes the deified was so
successful in his wars against Justinian, that the latter was obliged to pay
him an annual tribute of forty thousand pieces of gold (sacred besants). These
were most likely the pieces that, upon being recoined in Persia, were
venerated by its subservient populace.  Von Strahlenberg (p. 330) says that
the Iestiaks or Oes-tiaks, near Samarow, venerated a cufic coin of the
Arabians, from whom they had captured it.  In a tomb near the river Irtisch,
between the salt lake Iamischewa and the city Om-Iestroch, a flat oval gold
coin that had evidently been used as an object of worship, was found and
delivered to Prince Gagarin, the governor of Siberia (about A. D. 1715).]

[Footnote 1: Queipo, i., 449-52.]

[Footnote 2: "Journ. Asiat. Soc. Bengal," liii., 207-II.]

     It is evident that, by continuing the use of this myth, or by attaching a
sacerdotal character to the coinage and coins of gold, which in Italy may
hitherto have only been attached to consecrated deposits of gold - a character
which the conqueror, who was also the pontifex maximus of Rome, was quite
competent to confer upon it - he would not only acquire the means to republish
upon its coins the mythology and religious symbols of the empire, altered to
accord with his own impious pretensions of divine origin, but he would also be
enabled to reap profits equal to those which the Ptolemies had derived from
the oriental trade.  Indeed, in this respect Caesar made another innovation:
he increased the Roman ratio from 9 to 12 for 1, and there it remained fixed,
in consequence of his ordinance, for thirteen centuries.

     That Caesar attached a sacerdotal character to the gold coins of Rome,
and that Augustus and his successors, both the pagan and Christian
sovereign-pontiffs of the empire, continued and maintained this sacred
character is so abundantly evidenced that it has never been disputed.  It is
only in assigning reasons for the measures that numismatists have differed.
Evelyn believed that the gold coins were rendered sacred to preserve them from
profanation and secure them from abuse. ^1 Others have found the origin of
this regulation in the desire to preserve the most precious monuments of Roman
antiquity from the melting pot, and they point to the numerous coinage
restorations of Trajan as a proof of the Roman anxiety on this subject.  The
reasons herein suggested as the true ones are, first, the usefulness of coins
to proclaim monarchical and pontifical accessions, and to disseminate
religious doctrine; and, second, the profits of the oriental trade, which
could only be secured by means of an ordinance enjoying the sanctity of
religious authority.  These reasons even receive confirmation from the
contrary regulations adopted by the Arabians.  Whether in scorn of the Roman
mythology, or else to enhance the value of the immense silver spoil which they
had derived from the conquest of the Roman provinces in Asia, Africa and
Spain, or because they were unable or unwilling to continue that pretense of
sacredness, partly by means of which so artificially high a valuation of gold
had been created in Europe, it appears that when the Arabians came to
permanently regulate the affairs of the conquered provinces (reform of Abd-
el-Melik) they swept away the mythological emblems upon the coins for all
time, and for several centuries they destroyed the sacred character of gold.
They issued plain coins of constant weight and fineness, and reduced the ratio
to the Indian level (then) of 6 1/2 for 1.

[Footnote 1: Evelyn, "Medals," 224-7.]

     Whatever reasons induced Caesar to enhance the value of gold, there can
be no doubt of the fact.  In the scrupulum coinages of A. U. 437 the ratio was
10 silver for 1 gold; in the coinage system of Sylla (A. U. 675) the ratio was
9 for 1.  Caesar raised the value of his gold coins by a double jump to 12 for
1; in other words, without changing its value in silver coins, he gradually
lowered the aureus from 168 1/3 to 125 grains fine, and this alteration he
sanctified and rendered permanent by stamping upon the coins the most sacred
devices and solemn legends.  If this great politician of antiquity endeared
himself to the masses by thus lowering the measure of indebtedness, he secured
for his empire the approval of the patrician and commercial classes by
securing its stability, for the ratio which he adopted and solemnized was
never changed until Rome dissolved into a mere name - a name by which
ambitious princes afterward continued to conjure, but which at that late
period really belonged to a dead and powerless empire.

     In that admirable review of the Byzantine empire which forms the subject
of Gibbon's seventeenth chapter, he declares that by law the imperial taxes
during the dark ages were payable in gold coins alone. ^1 We now know the
reason of this ordinance - the oriental trade was gone.  The custom of the
period was that when gold coins were not paid, silver coins were accepted
instead, at the sacred weight ratio of 12.  In the reign of Theodosius the
officer entrusted with the gold coinage was the Comes Sacrarum Largitionum, or
Count of the Sacred Trust, one of the twenty-seven illustres, or greatest
nobles, of the empire.  His powers supplanted those of the former quaestori
praefecti aerarii and other high officers of the treasury.  His jurisdiction
extended over the mines whence gold was extracted, over the mints in which it
was converted into coins, over the revenues which, being payable in gold
coins, kept the latter in use and demand, and over the treasuries, in which
gold was deposited for the service of the sacred emperor or in exchange for
silver.  Even the woolen and linen manufactures and the foreign trade of the
empire were originally placed under the control of this minister, with the
view, no doubt, to regulate that exchange of Western silver for oriental gold,
of which some remains existed at the period of these elaborate and subtle
arrangements.

[Footnote 1: Same, in his Misc. works, iii., 460.]

     It is the peculiarity of sacerdotal ordinances that they long outlive the
purpose intended to be subserved by their enactment.  In the hot climates of
India, Egypt, Palestine and Arabia the interdiction of certain meats for food
may possibly have been originally founded upon hygienic considerations - a
fact that may have commended this ordinance to local acceptation, but
certainly did not earn for it that general and continued observance which it
owes to the Braminical, Jewish and Mahometan religions.  It is not to be
wondered that Justinian I. rebuked Theodoret the Frank for striking heretical
gold coins, nor that Justinian II. proclaimed war against Abd-el-Melik for
presuming to pay his tribute in other heretical gold; but it certainly seems
strange to find this myth observed in distant ages and among distant nations -
for example, to witness the pagan Danes of the mediaeval ages solemnizing
their oaths upon baugs of sacred gold; to find Henry III., of England, after
plundering the Jews of London, receiving the gold into his own hands, but the
silver by the hands of others; and to discover that Philip II., of Spain,
attempted to re-enact in America this played-out myth of idolatrous India,
Egypt and Rome. ^1

[Footnote 1: Procop. "Bel. Got.," iii., 33; Lenormant ii., 453, 454; Du
Chaillu, "Viking Age;" Matthew Paris, i., 459; "Recopilacion de Leyes de los
Reynos de las Indias," law of 1565.]

     The importance of this myth, in throwing light upon the political
relations of the Roman provinces toward the Byzantine and Western or mediaeval
empires, does not depend either upon its antiquity or the reasons of its
adoption into the Roman constitution, nor upon its general acceptance or
popularity.  It is sufficient for the purpose if it can be shown that, as a
matter of fact, the sovereign-pontiff alone enjoyed the prerogative of coining
gold throughout the Empire, and that the princes of the Empire respected this
prerogative.  It is submitted that concerning this cardinal fact the evidences
herein adduced are sufficient.