To coin a phrase, lots of Virgil line our pockets and purses. Real money may be a matter of digits on a credit card over the internet, but cultural identity is still summed up for a vocal minority of English in terms of heavy metal. The pound, that vestige of the ￡ibra (Schillings und Denarii). Here is a post-modern coin's paean to its own nature: round each rim runs the ￡egend:

DECVS*ET*TVTAMEN

So ￡ong as the ￡ettering is ￡egible, the pound is ￡egal currency. And so it proclaims: this inscription tells us its function, ‘ornament’ + ‘defence’, as Dryden would put it. This 3-D epigraphy is worth its weight in cash – it is the pound's ‘grace plus protection’. In fact, it works towards hendiadys (my favourite rhetorical figure, for some reason: ‘twofathepriceofone’; any ‘one-in-two’ cleft), since the single band running ceaselessly and unbroken 360° around the rim is at once the glory of the unit of exchange and the safeguard it is banking on. Credit where credit is due, these are the two sides of the coin's identity. Its realm must still be the Rome from Rome of pre-Commonwealth Britannia, for brass is brass, and never lies – in Anglo-￡atin.