... "for this reason, too, it seems that the greek cities, using the example of the cubit of six palms , subdivided the drachma, which they used as the unit of coin, into six stamped bronze coins, like our asses ( pounds ), which they call obols; and, to correspond to the twenty-four fingers, they further subdivided the drachma into twenty-four quarter-obols, which some call dichalca and others trichalca."
"8. but at first my countrymen selected the ancient number and decided the denarius into ten bronze pieces, which is why to this day the name devised for the unit retains the idea of a tenth. and they called the quarter-denarius, which comprises two and a half asses, the sestertius. afterwards, however, when they realized that both six and ten were perfect numbers, they combined them into one unit, thus creating the absolutely perfect number sixteen: they found authority for this in the foot. for if two palms are taken from a cubit, a foot of four palms is left: but the palm has four fingers: this is why the foot includes sixteen fingers and the bronze denarius the same number of asses."
vitruvius, on architecture: book three, chapter one. ( made into english by richard schofield )
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