The unit of money was the denarius, not the silver, but a copper coin introduced by Diocletian, of which the value has been fixed approximately at kth of a penny.
In the end, gently sifting away the excess, I uncovered another beautiful blackened denarius.
When Jesus asks them if they have a silver denarius on their person, He tricks them into answering their own question.
This is a silver denarius - the coin used to pay soldiers in the Roman army.
Besides his papers in the Philosophical Transactions, the principal works of Greaves are Pyramidographia, or a Description of the Pyramids in Egypt (1646); A Discourse on the Roman Foot and Denarius (1649); and Elementa linguae Persicae (1649).