Tom Metcalfe is a freelance journalist and regular Live Science contributor who is based in London in the United Kingdom. Tom writes mainly about science, space, archaeology, the Earth and the oceans. He has also written for the BBC, NBC News, National Geographic, Scientific American, Air & Space, and many others.
Archaeologists have discovered a trove of ancient silver coins"hidden in a hole in the wall" on a Mediterranean island near Sicily, possibly during a pirate attack more than 2,000 years ago.
Parts of the ruins are even older than the coins and date from the Punic or Carthaginian period, before the Punic Wars between Carthage and Rome in the third and second centuries B.C. Posted by regionesiciliana on The coins had been minted in Rome and were silver"denarii", the standard Roman coin for hundreds of years, the statement said. At this time, a single denarius was equivalent to about $20 — roughly a day's pay for a soldier in the Roman legions.
Pirates infested the eastern Mediterranean Sea and often raided coastal settlements until their defeat in 67 B.C. in a campaign waged by the Roman general Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus — Pompey the Great — who had risen to prominence as a henchman of the dictator Sulla.
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