The ancient medals were struck or cast; some were first cast and then struck.  The first coins of Rome and other cities of Italy must have been cast, as the hammer could not have produced so bold a relief.  The copper coins of Egypt were cast.  The right of coining money has always been one of the privileges which rulers have confined to themselves.  The free cities have inscribed only their names on their coins.  The cities subject to kings sometimes obtained permission to strike money in their own name, but were most frequently required to add the name or image of the king to whom they were subject.  The medals of the Parthians and the Phoenecians offer many examples of this sort.  Rome, under the republic, allowed no individual the right to coin money; no magistrate could put his name thereon, though this honor was sometimes allowed, as a special favor, by a decree of the Senate.  We can count as numismatic countries only those into which the Greeks and Romans carried the use of money; though some of the oriental nations used gold and silver as a medium of exchange, before their time it was by weight.  The people in the northern part of Europe had no money.

The coins preserved from antiquity are estimated to be more numerous than those we possess from the middle ages, in the proportion of a hundred to one!  Millin thinks that the number of extant ancient medals amounts to 70,000!  What a fund of the most curious and authentic information do they contain, and what a multitude of errors have been corrected by their means!  There are valuable cabinets of medals in all the principal cities of Europe; that of Paris is by far the richest; Pillerin alone added to it 33,000 ancient coins and medals.  The coins of the kings of Macedon are the most ancient of any yet discovered having portraits; and Alexander I., who commenced his reign about B.C. 500, is the earliest monarch whose medals have yet been found.  Then succeed the sovereigns who reigned in Sicily, Caria, Cyprus, Heraclea, and Pontus.  Afterwards comes the series of kings of Egypt, Syria, the Cimmerian Bosphorus, Thrace, Parthia, Armenia, Damascus, Cappadocia, Paphlagonia, Pergamos, Galatia, Cilicia, Sparta Paeonia, Epirus, Illyricum, Gaul, and the Alps.  This series reaches from the time of Alexander the Great to the Christian Era, comprising a period of about 330 years.  A perfect and distinct series is formed by the Roman emperors, from the time of Julius Caesar to the destruction of the empire, and even still later.  The Grecian medals claim that place in a cabinet, from their antiquity, which their workmanship might ensure them, independently of that advantageous consideration.  It is observed by Pinkerton, that an immense number of the medals of cities, which, from their character, we might judge to be of the highest antiquity, have a surprising strength, beauty, and relief in their impressions.  About the time of Alexander the Great, this art appears to have attained its highest perfection.  The