Word: denarius
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...penned down in that barbarian Hades. After all, we have other, more pressing, needs to consider, in the forests of Germania, and the deserts of Parthia. Who, in the Senate, will approach the emperor on this, and say—Ad venatum vadamus. Stercorem pro cerebro habes, sed denarius hic sistit: Let us cut to the chase. You have shit for brains and the buck stops here...
...footnotes, which proliferate in both written and pictorial forms. When archaeologists unearthed Pompeii beginning in the 18th century, they found scores of graffiti that, after some two millenniums, have not lost their topicality: "Here I enjoyed the favors of many girls"; "Here Arphocras pleasured himself with Drauca for a denarius"-about a penny...
After the Denarius. Throughout history, rulers unable to handle their monetary affairs have resorted to devaluation. The ancient Romans began to debase the denarius under Nero (A.D. 54-68) after they ran into-but failed to recognize-their balance of payments problems. Founded on plunder, Rome as an empire lacked the manufacturing, agriculture and commerce to pay for its costly imports. Trajan added copper to the once 99%-pure-silver denarius, and later the coin became wholly base metal. A century before Alaric sacked the Eternal City in A.D. 410, Rome had lost not only its purchasing power but also...
...beef could take a man to the edge of starvation. The system had at least one advantage: it had practically always been that way. The pound and penny first appeared about the time of King Offa in the 8th century. They were originally named for the Roman libra and denarius (hence the still used signs of ? and d), but the libra eventually evolved into the pound, because it was worth that weight in silver. Similarly, it took 240 pennies to make a pound because that was the number of pennies that weighed a pound.* Shillings joined Offa's awful...
Protestant scholars agree that there is some scholarly justification for the Catholic changes, and admit that occasionally the Catholic notes are better than their own. Where the Protestant RSV says that the familiar Biblical coin the denarius was worth about 20?, the Catholic edition more meaningfully explains that it was a day's wage for a laborer in New Testament times...