Thus Tarquinius became hated by all that was good and noble amongst the houses, as well as by the commons; and both orders cordially joined to effect his overthrow. But the evil of his tyranny survived him; it was not so easy to restore what he had destroyed as to expel him and his family; the commons no longer stood beside the patricians as an equal order, free, wealthy, well armed, and well organised; they were now poor, ill armed, and with no bonds of union; they therefore naturally sank beneath the power of the nobility, and the revolution which drove out the Tarquins established at Rome not a free commonwealth, but on the other hand an exclusive and tyrannical aristocracy. THE WEALTH OF THE ROMANS AND ITS SOURCES Niebuhr[c] has almost exhausted the subject of the Roman copper money. He has shown its originally low value, owing to the great abundance of the metal; that as it afterwards became scarce, a reduction in the weight of the coin followed naturally, not as a fraudulent depreciation of it, but because a small portion of it was now as valuable as a large mass had been before. The plenty of copper in early times is owing to this, that where it is found, it exists often in immense quantities, and even in large masses of pure metal on the surface of the soil. Thus the Copper Indians of North America found it in such abundance on their hills that they used it for all domestic purposes; but the supply thus easily obtained soon became exhausted. The small value of copper at Rome is shown not only by the size of the coins, they having been at first a full pound in weight, but also by the price of the war-horse, according to the regulation of Servius Tullius, namely ten thousand pounds of copper.[17] This statement, connected as it is with the other details of the census, seems original and authentic; nor considering the great abundance of cattle, and other circumstances, is it inconsistent with the account in Plutarch’s life of Publicola, that an ox in the beginning of the commonwealth, was worth one hundred oboli, and a sheep worth ten; nor with the provisions of the Aternian law, which fixed the price of the one at one hundred asses and the other at ten.