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The Romans sent a delegation to study Solon's reforms 150 years later and copied the ideas, setting up their own fiat money system under Lex Aternia in 454 BC.
It is a myth - innocently propagated by the great Adam Smith - that money developed as a commodity-based or gold-linked means of exchange. Gold was always highly valued, but that is another story. Metal-lovers often conflate the two issues.
Anthropological studies show that social fiat currencies began with the dawn of time. The Spartans banned gold coins, replacing them with iron disks of little intrinsic value. The early Romans used bronze tablets. Their worth was entirely determined by law - a doctrine made explicit by Aristotle in his Ethics - like the dollar, the euro, or sterling today.
^^^^^ CB: Besides the fact that the Spartans and Greeks were not at the "dawn of time", there were hundreds of other societies and modes of production besides Greece and Rome and the others referred to here, and many of them probably had commodity money and barter. There was barter within European feudal manors. The anthropological (archeological /historical) studies referred to cannot purport to have discovered universal principles of ancient societies. In the early US, taxes could be paid with hemp.
http://hempreneur.wordpress.com/2008/09/01/pay-your-taxes-with-cannabis-hemp/
Pay your taxes with Cannabis Hemp Posted on September 1, 2008 by hempreneur
“In 1619, America’s first marijuana law was enacted at Jamestown Colony, Virginia, ‘ordering’ all farmers to ‘make tryal of’ Indian hemp seed. More mandatory hemp cultivation laws were enacted in Massachusetts in 1631, in Connecticut in 1632 and in the Chesapeake Colonies into the mid-1700’s. Cannabis hemp was legal tender in most of the America’s from 1631 until the early 1800’s, and you could pay your taxes with cannabis hemp for over 200 years.” from the Hemp and Marijuana Conspiracy
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Some argue that Rome began to lose its solidarity spirit when it allowed an oligarchy to develop a private silver-based coinage during the Punic Wars. Money slipped control of the Senate. You could call it Rome's shadow banking system. Evidence suggests that it became a machine for elite wealth accumulation.