he precious metals in these beautiful but unproductive objects.
The quantity of gold and silver moulded into the form of vases, statues,
tripods, and personal ornaments, which was accumulated in Rome at the
time it was taken by the Goths, would exceed belief if not attested by
the unanimous testimony of all the contemporary writers. Great part of
it was thrown into the Tiber, where it still remains covered by the
alluvial deposits of fourteen centuries; the most precious of the spoils
were buried with Alaric in the bed of a stream in Calabria, where that
redoubtable conqueror was overtaken by the common fate of mortality. The
place where he was interred was kept a profound secret, and the slaves
who dug his grave in the bed of the river, of which the course had been
turned aside for the purpose, were put to death, and buried with him and
his treasures; and the river itself was immediately let into its old
channel, that its ceaseless flow might secure, as it since has done, the
grave of the mighty chief from disturbance, and enable him to present
himself loaded with his earthly spoils in the land of spirits.[66]

The concurring operation of these causes produced, in the three last
centuries of the Roman empire, a very great scarcity in the supply of
the precious metals for the purposes of the public currency, and
consequently a most distressing fall in prices, and diminution in the
remuneration of industry, accompanied by a proportional increase in the
weight of debt and taxes. And the progressive effect of these changes
appeared in the clearest manner, in the repeated changes which were made
by successive emperors in the value of the gold and silver coins which
passed current in the empire. Gold became progressively so scarce in
proportion to silver, that the proportion between the two, which at
first had been 1 to 10 in the time of Augustus, rose in time to 1 to
12-1/2, and was fixed by Constantine the Great at 1 to 14-2/5ths.[67] In
consequence of this rise in the value of gold--the precise counterpart
of what was experienced in Great Britain in the later years of the war,
when a _light_ guinea sold for 25s.--the quantity of gold in the
_aureus_, or chief gold Roman coin, was progressively diminished, till
it came to contain little more than _half_ its former weight of that
precious metal. The learned Greaves has shown, after diligent inquiry,
that while in the time of the Antonines the _aureus_ weighed 118, in the
tim