MORE IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT YOUR TRAVEL TO Siliqua

The siliqua is the modern name given (without any ancient evidence to confirm the designation) to small, thin, Roman silver coins produced in the 4th century A.D. and later. When the coins were in circulation, the Latin word siliqua was a unit of weight defined by one late Roman writer as one twenty-fourth of the weight of a Roman solidus. "Siliqua vicesima quarta pars solidi est, ab arbore, cuius semen est, vocabulum tenens."A siliqua is one-twentyfourth of a solidus [coin] and the name is taken from the seed of a tree. The term siliqua comes from the siliqua graeca, the seed of the carob tree, which in the Roman weight system is equivalent to 1/6 of a scruple (1/1728 of a Roman pound or about 0.19 grams). The term has been applied in modern times to various silver coins on the premise that the coins were valued at 1/24 of the gold solidus (which weighed 1/72 of a Roman pound) and therefore represented a siliqua of gold in value. Since gold was worth about 14 times as much as silver in ancient Rome, such a silver coin would have a theoretical weight of 2.7 grams. There is little historical evidence to support this premise.