Like many clichés, Horace's sour depiction of Roman pragmatism has some truth to it – except that the Greeks were just as interested as the Romans in correctly dividing currency into parts. Metrology, the knowledge of measures of weight, length, volume and of money, was a major presence in ancient education and ancient life. The excavations of the Athenian agora have turned up some two hundred metrological objects. A great many papyri from Hellenistic and Roman Egypt are accounts, bills, or contracts stipulating sizes or weights of things. Texts such as the so-called Athenian coinage decree or the bilingual tax decree from Palmyra are expressions of political and economic decisions variously translated into metrological policies.

The act of measuring creates a correspondence between things in the real world and symbols, be they numbers, units of measurement, or signs representing numbers or units of measurement. For instance, the Palmyra decree enforces a correspondence between, say, a sack of salt and two symbols: a number expressing its volume, expressed in terms of modii (units of measurement), and another number, tied by decree to the first one, expressing the tax tariff in terms of duty per modius.