Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/230

the purchase of grain, when a failure of the harvest occurred in Rome, from the Volscians, Cumæans, and Siceliots (and, as was natural, from the Etruscans also); but, above all, the relation subsisting between the Latin and Sicilian monetary systems. As the local Dorico-Chalcidian designation of silver coin, νόμος, and the Sicilian measure, ἡμίνα, were transferred, retaining their meaning to Latium as nummus and hemina, so conversely the Italian designations of weight, libra, triens, quadrans, sextans, uncia, which came into use id Latium for the weighing of the copper which served instead of money, had already found their way into the common speech of Sicily in the third century of the city under the corrupt and hybrid forms, λίτρα, τριᾶς, τετρᾶς, ἑξᾶς, οὐγκία. Indeed, among all the Greek systems of weights and moneys, the Sicilian alone was brought into a determinate proportional relation to the Italian copper-system; not only was the value of silver set down conventionally and perhaps legally as two hundred and fifty times that of copper, but the equivalent on this computation of a Sicilian pound of copper (1/120th of the Attic talent, 2/3 of the Roman pound) was already in very early times struck at Syracuse as a silver coin (λίτρα ἀργυρίου, i.e. "pound of copper in silver"). Accordingly it cannot be doubted that Italian bars of copper circulated also in Sicily instead of money; and this exactly harmonizes with the hypothesis that the commerce of the Latins with Sicily was a passive commerce, and in consequence Latin money was drained away thither. Other proofs of ancient intercourse between Sicily and Italy, especially the adoption in the Sicilian dialect of the Italian expressions for a commercial loan, a prison, and a dish, and the converse reception of Sicilian terms in Italy, have been already mentioned (P. 166, 206). We meet also with several, though less definite, traces of an ancient intercourse of the Latins with the Chalcidian cities in Lower Italy, Cuumb and Neapolis, and with the Phocæans in Velia and Massilia. That it was however far less active than that with the Siceliots is shown by the well-known fact that all the Greek words which made their way in earlier times to Latium exhibit Doric forms—we need only recall Æsculapius, Latona, Aperta, machina. Had their dealings with the originally Ionian cities, such as Cumæ (P. 144) and the Phocæan settlements, been on a similar scale with those which they had with the Sicilian Dorians, Ionic forms would at least have made