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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;kevin McGonigal, post: 3789773, member: 72790&quot;]If what you mean is, &quot;What did the people call the coins in the marketplace&quot;, we don&#039;t know. Bankers and money changers had to be precise with the terms for obvious reasons, but even here there must have been anomalies, especially in handling something like Roman provincials. In some cases calculations would have been done by weight and it did not matter what the coin was called, either locally or by official decree. In a sophisticated market place of a major urban center there must have been local names that shoppers and shopkeepers used for well known currency just as we do. In the shopkeeper&#039;s ledger he might have called a coin a denarius or a sestertius or a drachma but when bargaining he might have used a more regional or colloquial name, the ones we don&#039;t know. Think of us barraging at a garage sale or flea market. &quot;I&#039;ll give you two bucks for that item&quot;. For the customer and seller it&#039;s two bucks. For the bank it&#039;s two dollars. In ancient times that market coinage might have been two silver pieces with everybody understanding just what a silver piece was. Again, two coppers might be well understood&nbsp; as what the mint named assess or assaria. When in the later Roman Empire barbarians demanded gold pieces, everybody knew what was meant, solidi. In the early empire, it would have been aurei (which just means gold pieces, anyway). Like many others I, too, wonder what actually transpired in the market place with respect to transactions but this is not the sort of thing Xenophon or Aristotle, Cicero or Vergil wrote about.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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