In the embarrassed period of the civil war and of the great financial crisis they seem to have so unduly availed themselves of plating, that a monetary crisis accompanied the financial one, and the quantity of spurious and really worthless pieces rendered dealings extremely insecure.

Accordingly during the Cinnan government an enactment was passed by the praetors and tribunes, primarily by Marcus Marius Gratidianus,( 45) for redeeming all the token-money by silver, and for that purpose an assay-office was established.

How far the calling-in was accomplished, tradition has not told us; the coining of token-money itself continued to subsist.
As to the provinces, in accordance with the setting aside of gold money on principle, the coining of gold was nowhere permitted, not even in the client-states; so that a gold coinage at this period occurs only where Rome had nothing at all to say, especially among the Celts to the north of the Cevennes and among the states in revolt against Rome; the Italians, for instance, as well as Mithradates Eupator struck gold coins.

The government seems to have made efforts to bring the coinage of silver also more and more into its hands, particularly in the west.

In Africa and Sardinia the Carthaginian gold and silver money may have remained in circulation even after the fall of the Carthaginian state; but no coinage of precious metals took place there after either the Carthaginian or the Roman standard, and certainly very soon after the Romans took possession, the -denarius- introduced from Italy acquired the predominance in the transactions of the two countries.
In Spain and Sicily, which came earlier to the Romans and experienced altogether a milder treatment, silver was no doubt coined under the Roman rule, and indeed in the former country the silver coinage was first called into existence by the Romans and based on the Roman standard;( 46) but there exist good grounds for the supposition, that even in these two countries, at least from the beginning of the seventh century, the provincial and urban mints were obliged to restrict their issues to copper small money.
Only in Narbonese Gaul the right of coining silver could not be withdrawn from the old-allied and considerable free city of Massilia; and the same was presumably true of the Greek cities in Illyria, Apollonia and Dyrrhachium.