David Schwei

The addition of the aureus to the Roman imperial coinage system has not yet been fully explained, but a convergence of four factors in the 40s BCE explains this coin’s introduction and continuation. First, the use of gold coins as a medium of exchange and store of value was easily comprehensible for Romans. Second, the civil wars in the 40s and 30s provided the need for a high value coin so the generals struck numerous aurei. Thirdly, Romans perceived a need for more media of exchange during the debt crisis of the 40s so the coin was readily accepted into common use. Finally, the mint continued to produce aurei to pay the imperial army.

"The reign of Nero was momentous in the numismatic history of the Roman Empire, and it is key to understanding the nature of Roman coinage and its relationship with the Roman state. Since the time of Theodor Mommsen, scholars have recognized a change in the circulation patterns of denarii indicating a Neronian debasement and subsequent recoinage of the denarius.... Building on these observations [of various scholars] and recognizing the methodological deficiencies in Walker’s x-ray fluorescence (XRF) analyses of silver coins, Butcher and Matthew Ponting embarked on a campaign of new metallurgical analyses of the denarius and eastern tetradrachm coinages. In the recent publication of their results, they clarify the Neronian changes, convincingly argue against a fiscal interpretation, and offer a new monetary interpretation. They argue that the debasement of the denarius in 64 resulted in harmonisation with the eastern coinages. The denarius could, it seemed to them, be interpreted as a Roman drachm. I agree with Butcher and Ponting’s analysis of the numismatic evidence, but I disagree with them about the inspiration and motivation for, significance of, and implications of the new Neronian silver standards and circulation patterns. In this article, I offer an overview of the Neronian numismatic changes, and a new monetary interpretation which suggests that the silver standards were established in order to reflect fixed exchange rates among the empire’s coinages and eliminate the production of the Tyrian shekel. The article will end by comparing my position with that of Butcher and Ponting." (p. 107)

The coins struck for Demetrius II Nicator provide an insight into how mint officials reacted to Alexander II Zabinas’s challenge to the throne. While literature reveals the royal response, a die study of the coins from Antioch and Damascus demonstrates that production at these mints was little affected by the war. Mint administrators relied on loyal workers, such as the two engravers whose movements can be traced. Although the production of coinage seems to have continued at a normal pace, the weight standard at Damascus dropped slightly.

Coins permeated the Roman Empire, and they offer a unique perspective into the ability of the Roman state to implement its decisions in Italy and the provinces. This dissertation examines how this ability changed and grew over time, between 60 B.C. and A.D. 68, as seen through coin production. Earlier scholars assumed that the mint at Rome always produced coinage for the entire empire, or they have focused on a sudden change under Augustus. Recent advances in catalogs, documentation of coin hoards, and metallurgical analyses allow a fuller
picture to be painted. This dissertation integrates the previously overlooked coinages of Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt with the denarius of the Latin West. In order to measure the development of the Roman state’s infrastructural power, this dissertation combines the anthropological ideal types of hegemonic and territorial empires with the numismatic method of detecting coordinated activity at multiple mints. The Roman state exercised its power over various regions to different extents, and it used its power differently over time. During the
Republic, the Roman state had low infrastructural minting capacity. The Roman state’s infrastructural power over the European and African provinces grew as more regions began using the denarius and its bronze coin fractions. The Roman state’s minting infrastructural reach
suddenly extended into Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt during the reign of Nero and continued to increase thereafter. In the Imperial Period, the state’s infrastructural power was modest and limited to some extent, as it managed an empire-wide system of coordinated mints in which the
mints also retained some autonomy. This diachronic sketch suggests that the state’s infrastructural minting capacity grew significantly about one hundred years into the Imperial Period, in part due to the development of an imperial ideology.

Historians and numismatists have often debated the significance of the topical, commemorative publicity in Roman coin types, and an important part of this debate is how intelligible the types were to the inhabitants of the empire. Scholars have relied on literary sources that primarily refer to coins’ portraits, not the legends and rarely the reverse types. In this debate, the numismatic evidence has been relatively neglected or used too speculatively. This paper will examine ancient forgeries of the coinage struck for Cassius, the assassin of Julius Caesar, in order to understand how well the messages of the coins were understood. Forgeries offer a unique perspective on the intelligibility of coin types: they reveal how well the forger understood the coin’s types and message. An ongoing die study of Cassius’s coins reveals how forgeries were made with hubs of coins and with forger’s dies. The coins produced by both methods reveal that the forgers carefully reproduced visually similar coins, but they did not understand the legends. This confusion and their process show that the forgers did not understand the coins’ messages, especially if the significance of the types was revealed through the coins’ legends. The paper will show, then, that many inhabitants of the empire did not understand the coins’ messages, sometimes due to illiteracy.

Inscriptions attest two very different titles for the men who were in charge of imperial Rome’s mint: the IIIviri aere argento auro feriundo flando and the procurator monetae. Theodor Mommsen proposed that the mints were controlled by a dyarchy. The Senate and triumvirs, who had run the mint during the Republic, issued bronze coins; and the emperor and his procurators issued gold and silver coins. Even though this model explained how both sets of officials controlled the mint in Rome, historians have rejected it in favor of a model of cooperation among the Senate, emperor, and magistrates. Numismatists have been unable to explain the roles of the triumvirs and the procurators at the imperial mint, in part because they only look at the issue synchronically. Some continue to accept the dyarchy model (Sutherland 1976, Burnett 1977), others assume the triumvirate became a merely nominal office (Carson 1956), and others choose not to fully address the problem (Peachin 1986, Wolters 1999). In this paper, I will examine the leadership of the mint at Rome diachronically in order to demonstrate that the triumvirs and procurators cooperated in order to run the imperial mint where gold, silver, and bronze coins were issued from a single entity. This diachronic examination reveals how the emperor and his procurators gradually developed their cooperation with the triumvirs.
First, I will show how the triumvirs retained control of the mint during the empire.  Between c. 23 and c. 7 B.C.E., the triumvirs continued to issue gold, silver, and bronze coins with their own names in the coin legends. At the end of Augustus’s reign, their names disappeared from the bronze coins from the mint of Rome. Their names’ absence is part of a larger trend of limited senatorial self-representation at Rome that began during Augustus’s reign (Eck 1984, Eck 2010). The moneyers did not lose control of the mint because inscriptions attest the presence of their office into the third century (Jones 1970).
Next, I will clarify how the emperor gradually gained influence at the mint through subordinates who eventually ran the mint together with the triumvirs.  During the Julio-Claudian period, the emperor’s influence at the mint began. Two inscriptions reveal that members of the familia Caesaris had begun to work at the empire’s mints, but they did not serve as the mint masters (CIL 6.8461 = ILS 1637, CIL 13.1820 = ILS 1639). Soon, the emperor added procurators who helped run the mint. The procurators are first attested during the reign of Trajan (Pflaum 1960), but their unclear title causes confusion about how the mint was administered. Therefore, I will also clarify the official’s title.  The earliest known procurator and the majority of procurators’ titles are inscribed as procurator monetae, and the minority of procurators’ titles are inscribed as procurator monetae Augusti. The latter implies that the mint is owned and firmly controlled by the emperor, but the former does not. The addition of the word “Augusti” to the title is a reflection of the imperial ideology that encouraged the belief that the emperor controlled the mints (Ando 2000).  Since this, perhaps fictitious, ideology is expressed in the minority of the inscriptions, the procurator’s title was just procurator monetae.  Without the implication that the emperor owned and controlled the mint, it is reasonable to assume that the procurators and the triumvirs were free to collaborate in the production of gold, silver, and bronze coins. Werner Eck has proposed a similar model of collaboration for procurators and provincial governors (Eck 2000).  In the mint at Rome, this teamwork allowed each official to prevent the other officials from abusing their power as they cooperatively ran the entire mint. This diachronic study demonstrates for the first time how the emperor collaborated with the traditional Roman officials in order to produce coins. It also clarifies one way through which this cooperation developed over the first century C.E.


Bibliography

Ando, Clifford 2000. Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bay, Aase 1972. “The Letters SC on Augustan Aes Coinage,” JRS 62, pp. 111-122.
Brunt, P. A. 1983. “Princeps and Equites,” JRS 73, pp. 42-75.
Burnett, Andrew M. 1977. “The Authority to Coin in the Late Republic and Early Empire,” NC7 17, pp. 37-63.
Carson, R. A. G. 1956. “System and Product in the Roman Mint,” Essays in Roman Coinage Presented to Harold Mattingly, eds. R. A. G. Carson and C. H. V. Sutherland, London: Oxford University Press, pp. 227-239.
Eck, Werner 1984. “Senatorial Self-Representation: Developments in the Augustan Period,” Caesar Augustus: Seven Aspects, eds. Fergus Millar and Erich Segal, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 129-168.
--------. 2000. “Provincial Administration and Finances,” Cambridge Ancient History2, vol. 11, ed. Arthur Cook Stanley, F. E. Adcock, and M. P. Charlesworth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 266-282.
--------. 2010. “Emperor and Senatorial Aristocracy in Competition for Public Space,” The Emperor and Rome: Space, Representation, and Ritual, Yale Classical Studies, 35, eds. Björn C. Ewald and Carlos F. Noreña, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 89-110.
Mommsen, Theodor 1887. Römisches Staatsrecht, Leipzig: S. Herzel.
Peachin, Michael 1986. “The Procurator Monetae,” NC 146, pp. 94-106.
Pflaum, H.-G. 1950. Les procurateurs équestres sous le Haut-Empire romain, Paris: Libraire d’Amérique et d’Orient.
--------. 1960. Les carriers procuratoriennes équestres sous le Haut-Empire romain, Bibliothèque archéologique et historique, 57, Paris: P. Geuthner.
-------. 1982. Les carriers procuratoriennes équestres sous le Haut-Empire romain: Supplement. Bibliothèque archéologique et historique, 112, Paris: P. Geuthner.
Sutherland, C. H. V. 1976. The Emperor and the Coinage: Julio-Claudian Studies, London: Spink.
Wolters, Reinhard 1999. Nummi Signati: Untersuchungen zur römischen Münzprägung und Geldwirtschaft, Munich: C. H. Beck.

I have developed several videos for use in my own Latin and Classics classes. In addition to cultural videos, I am working on adding to the excellent videos of latintutorial so that YouTube has some short explanations of constructions as well as morphological videos.

I have also collected various helpful videos in to playlists on the ancient world (Classics), 3D constructions of ancient buildings, Latin grammar (videos from both latintutorial and myself), Roman emperors,  Greek mythology, people reading Latin texts in Latin, and videos helpful for a modern global history course.

Teachers of ancient Greece and Rome, of ancient Greek and Latin face numerous challenges in the twenty-first century.  We share information about an age with limited literacy, no electricity, and loquacious authors to students from an age of gadgets, ubiquitous electricity, and high literacy.  The ideas, culture, and grammar of a two-thousand year old culture can be hard to communicate when few of Cicero or Thucydides’ sentences can fit in a tweet or text message.

Many trends in education pass us by, go unnoticed, or seem ill-suited to Latin and Classics when they are presented in science classrooms, for modern foreign languages, or in an abstract way.  This blog seeks to share one teacher’s continuing journey to become a better teacher: how I improve, how I teach, and how I bridge the gap of millennia.  My posts are based on both/either research and/or on my own experiences.  The posts will be honest and reflexive.  I would love to hear your reactions to these methods, how they could further improve, and how they might inspire you to rethink your own teaching practices.

Suggestions for posts are also welcome.

The addition of the aureus to the Roman imperial coinage system has not yet been fully explained, but a convergence of four factors in the 40s BCE explains this coin’s introduction and continuation. First, the use of gold coins as a medium of exchange and store of value was easily comprehensible for Romans. Second, the civil wars in the 40s and 30s provided the need for a high value coin so the generals struck numerous aurei. Thirdly, Romans perceived a need for more media of exchange during the debt crisis of the 40s so the coin was readily accepted into common use. Finally, the mint continued to produce aurei to pay the imperial army.

Coins permeated the Roman Empire, and they offer a unique perspective into the ability of the Roman state to implement its decisions in Italy and the provinces. This dissertation examines how this ability changed and grew over time, between 60 B.C. and A.D. 68, as seen through coin production. Earlier scholars assumed that the mint at Rome always produced coinage for the entire empire, or they have focused on a sudden change under Augustus. Recent advances in catalogs, documentation of coin hoards, and metallurgical analyses allow a fuller picture to be painted. This dissertation integrates the previously overlooked coinages of Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt with the denarius of the Latin West. In order to measure the development of the Roman state’s infrastructural power, this dissertation combines the anthropological ideal types of hegemonic and territorial empires with the numismatic method of detecting coordinated activity at multiple mints. The Roman state exercised its power over various regions to different extents, and it used its power differently over time. During the Republic, the Roman state had low infrastructural minting capacity. The Roman state’s infrastructural power over the European and African provinces grew as more regions began using the denarius and its bronze coin fractions. The Roman state’s minting infrastructural reach suddenly extended into Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt during the reign of Nero and continued to increase thereafter. In the Imperial Period, the state’s infrastructural power was modest and limited to some extent, as it managed an empire-wide system of coordinated mints in which the mints also retained some autonomy. This diachronic sketch suggests that the state’s infrastructural minting capacity grew significantly about one hundred years into the Imperial Period, in part due to the development of an imperial ideology.