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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;kevin McGonigal, post: 8296039, member: 72790&quot;]Excellent leg work, Marsyas Mike. if you permit me, I&#039;d translate those lines as something like, &quot; so that the understanding of the coinage was so disturbed that no one was able to figure out just what he had&quot;.&nbsp; The verb &quot;jactare&quot; is usually translated as to throw or hurl as in to throw a javelin but as you can see it can also mean, disturb and I think the meaning is that something, maybe some debasement but maybe something else like the issue of plated coins or the coinage of the Italian socii still in circulation from the Social war had so disturbed the marketplace that the value of the coinage was in doubt. I am not so sure that the problem here is one of debasement. Being able to distinguish a pure silver coin (and no Ancient coin was really 100% pure) from a 90% coin fine is not so easy to do ( even if the marketplace knew enough about Archimedes to do a specific gravity test) so maybe the problem was light weight coins. If so, simply having and employing a balance scale might have turned the trick to ferret out the problem, the method Cicero mentions being used to solve the problem and restore confidence in the coinage.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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