Delineation of Ancient and Modern Numismatics

while on the other a ratis raft or ship appears, whence they are called nummi ratiti raft-coins, and the old proverb: "Heads or tails" (literally: "Head or ship"). Hence Ovid, Fasti, Book I, line 239:

But a virtuous posterity formed the ship on the bronze,
Bearing witness to the arrival of the guest God.

Compare lines 229-230. Compare Grosei de Bose, Dissertation on the Janus of the ancients and on several coins looking back to him; in the first of the Selectae Dissertationes de rarioribus numis antiquis Selected Dissertations on rarer ancient coins (published at Hamburg, 1709, quarto).

When a certain value was assigned to every species, it was called pecunia money or moneta mint/money from monendo warning/advising, because every species warned of a certain value or weight: or because it warns that no fraud be made in the metal or weight. See Cicero, On Divination, Books I and II; and Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, Book XVI, Chapter XVII. Compare David Hoffmann's dissertation held at the Academia Julia in 1717, On the Goddess Moneta, and Lingen's cited pamphlet, Chapter VI, On the origin of money among the Romans, page 67 and following.

The value of Roman bronze coins was of the customary as. The As, however, which is also called the assis (not to be confused with the as of the jurists regarding inheritance, which was divided into twelve ounces), was first libralis one-pound weight and dupondius two-pound weight; then sextantarius one-sixth of a pound; later, by the Papirian law, it was uncialis one-ounce weight; and finally it was semiuncialis half-ounce weight. See Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, Book IX; Guillaume Budé's Book on the As and its Parts; and Henricus Loritus Glareanus's book on the same subject, Basel, 1550, folio.