The Roman Emperor named Little Caesar lounged on his thrown one day, frowning at an enormous pile of grapes.

    "Little Brutus!!" he suddenly shouted, "I need you to count ALL of these grapes immediately!" commanded Little Caesar, pointing a threatening finger.

    "Right away emperor!" shouted back Little Brutus, and then he hurried away.

    Little Brutus gathered Rome's finest mathematicians, and together they began to brainstorm ideas.

    Little Brutus suggested using circles. Tertius on his right thought they should use pyramids. Paulus on the right of Tertius only laid down and stared at his fingers. They all sat without a clue of what to do.

    Suddenly, Paulus who had been staring at his fingers sat up while still staring at his hands exclaimed "Aha!" and got up. He slowly began to say "Why...don't we use our fingers...to count?"

    Paulus held up his hand and made a V-shape with his hand and said "Hear me out, what if we used the shape of our hands to represent a symbol to count?"

    The other two held out their hands in front of them in realization and both exclaimed "WOOOAH!" and then proceeded with "HUUUH??"

      Little Brutus frowned in confusion and said "But, we can't count all of those grapes on fingers alone!        

    Paulus held up his hand and put up one finger and held one grape in the other hand.

    "This finger looks like an "I" letter, and it's also equals one, so the "I" letter will represent one grape. Then you keep adding an I for each grape, so you would have 3 "I" letters for 3 grapes."

    Paulus continues to say that for four grapes it should be four letter "I"s should equal 4 grapes, but then Tertius cuts in.

"Wait, that's too many letters to write!"

    Paulus replies with resignation " You right, you right. why don't we go back to four later?"

    "Oh! Oh!" says Little Brutus, "What if we put I and V together, and make it mean that you're subtracting 5 by 1 which would then equal...4!"

    Tertius speaks up again and asks "But what if I want to go up from V?"

    Paulus thinks for a second, and then says "We should put the V in front of the I, and add them instead, so then it will equal 6!"

    Little Brutus appeared to have a lightbulb go off in his head and spoke "So what you're saying is that if we have a smaller number in front of a bigger number you subtract it, but if you have a bigger number in front of a smaller number, you add it?"

    "Precisely!" Paulus declared.