The Romans were a very smart group of people, with a very high level of sophistication for their time. For example, they had a form of central heating, as well as running hot water, steam rooms, thousands of miles of virtually straight roads and the most highly trained army in history, up to 2/3 centuries either side of the birth of Jesus Christ.

However, their Numerical System, though good, was not as sophisticated as the Arabic system which we in the West use today. In fact they didn't even use numbers as we know them. They used letters to represent numbers. Their system had simple, but effective rules. The first we will use in Level 1.

THE NUMBERS ….or should I say, Letters?

1, 2, 3, 4 = I, II, III, IIII

Very straight forward, though later we will see a simpler way of writing 4.

The Romans used letters to represent bigger Numbers:

V = 5; X = 10; L = 50; C = 100; D = 500; M = 1000