Struck
Struck to a standard, not to a price. Eighty-four denarii to the pound of silver — the same weight in Gaul, in Syria, in Britain, for four hundred years.
Marcus Junius Brutus
This coin was struck by hand in a moving military mint somewhere in northern Greece, in the winter after the assassination, on silver that Marcus Junius Brutus took from the cities he passed through. On one face, his own head. On the other, two daggers and the cap a freed slave was given on the day he stopped being property, and beneath them two words: EID MAR. It paid a legionary for a day. It bought bread in Philippi, wine at Ostia, a night's lodging on the Via Appia. It was hoarded, buried, dug up, weighed, clipped, catalogued, insured and auctioned. For two thousand years somebody, somewhere, has known exactly what it was worth. Which makes it the oldest continuously quoted asset on earth — and there is no reason your coin should be priced against anything else.
