Study of the denarial coinage and that of the provinces is at two distinct stages of development. The former has long been known in great detail, with standard catalogues listing its varieties and few new discoveries; this has facilitated further recording by defining what is not known and easing cataloguing of well-known varieties. Even such primitive tools as the alphabetical listing of Cohen (1880-92) facilitated abbreviated recording of coin hoards and finds, an aspect of the discipline that has reached maturity in the last two decades: new discoveries help refine, in ever greater detail, the chronology and structure of imperial mints (e. g. the Eauze hoard: Schaad 1992; Venera hoard: Estiot 1987, 1995; Giard 1995; Gricourt 2000; Normanby hoard: Bland 1988; Cunetio hoard: Besly and Bland 1983). The same cannot be said of the provincial coinage, for which there is not yet a standard work of reference and much new material continues to emerge. This disparity dictates different strategies of study.
No official document survives in anything like the quantities of imperial coinage; and as it is money, it is natural to try to count it. In perhaps the most influential piece of work ever addressed to numismatists, A. H. M. Jones wrote as follows (1956: 23):
Could it be estimated how many aurei and denarii were annually minted in the reigns of the successive emperors from Augustus to Septimius Severus relatively to the number of aurei and antoniniani (or denarii) minted annually from the reign of Caracalla to that of Aurelian? Was there, as the literary sources would suggest, an abnormally heavy output of aurei in the latter part of Trajan’s reign? Again, what was the relative volume of Diocletian’s gold and silver issues to those of Constantine?
Numismatists generally estimate the relative commonness of coins by looking at their occurrence in hoards. For portions of the coinage in which the hoard evidence is abundant (and where the sample has not been altered by recall or suppression) this method, though crude, seems reliable as far as it goes; despite the efforts of Duncan-Jones and others, no satisfactory way has been found of establishing mint output in any absolute sense of the term (Duncan-Jones 1994, with Metcalf 1995; Buttrey 1993, 1994; de Callatay 1995).
As far as we can now see, the curve of output is steadily upward in the silver coinage; it reaches a peak during the Antonine period in aes, then declines, then rises again before the effective end of the coinage under Valerian and Gallienus. In the second century the output of gold peaks under M. Aurelius; for the third the amount of evidence available is insufficient to form any reliable conclusions (but see Bland 1996).
Most of this coinage is the product of a fairly small minting operation at Rome: inscriptions of Trajanic date seem to represent that portion of the mint given over to actual manufacture of the coins, and their numbers are small, including only 22 malleatores whose work was the essential step in production (Carson 1956; Alfoldi 1958/9). This mint, in addition to producing the ‘‘mainstream’’ coinage of Rome, took a sporadic role in making coinage for the provinces as well. It is now generally agreed that some of the imperial coinage once attributed to Caesarea in Cappadocia was produced there, and there are clear cases in which Rome struck for other provinces as well: Alexandria under Severus Alexander, Antioch under Philip I (Metcalf 1996; Burnett and Craddock 1983; Baldus 1969). This is quite apart from the question of ‘‘consignment’’ of batches of coins from Rome to designated areas, a phenomenon most clearly documented for Britain (Walker 1988). Why these interventions occurred, and why, once undertaken, they were not continued, remains a mystery.
The types and legends of the imperial coinage were the principal impetus to its early study; after a long quiescence (for which see A. H. M. Jones 1956) these continue to excite interest. The authority behind the coinage, in its early stages, has been debated: the almost invariable occurrence of S C on aes coinage has been taken to lie behind the original Augustan reform (Bay 1972) or to reflect continuing senatorial involvement in coin production (Burnett 1977). Clearly the individual object gained its authority from the imperial image (Wallace-Hadrill 1986), but this cannot be taken literally as an expression of the inspiration of the content. The debate goes on: one interesting reading suggests that many coin types were devised to please the emperor himself as the most important member of the audience (Levick 1982).
The impact of the coinage is another matter. The work of Paul Zanker (1988) has shown that a whole atmosphere can be created through management of art, and coinage is a part of this; but its workings in detail are hard to track and attempts to distinguish the audience for coinage on the basis of its likely users have been less than wholly successful (Metcalf 1993). The problem is complicated because we cannot really estimate the size of any particular component of the coinage in any more than a relative way, and it is impossible to gauge the relative size of, say, the gold and silver as against the aes. Diametrically opposed views can still be expressed (Ehrhardt 1984; Crawford 1983).
Recent years have seen two significant efforts to address coin imagery. One has to do with a single new discovery: an aureus of Octavian struck, probably in Asia, during his sixth consulship (28 bce) and proclaiming LEGES ET IVRA P R RESTITVIT and showing Octavian seated on a curule chair with a scrinium by his side, into which he is about to place a roll (see Rowe, this volume and Figure 2.2). The subject of the sentence is provided by the obverse legend of the coin (IMP CAESAR DIVI F COS VI) but no words were necessary to apprehend its import. The coin - whose verbiage might have been lifted, mutatis mutandis, from Augustus’ Res Gestae - is an ideal reflection of the symbolic equality of obverse and reverse: the words themselves invite the user to turn over the coin, and the message may be read beginning on either side. More than this, the coin is a genuine historical document whose official utterance is above question; it demands modification of the view, based on Cassius Dio, that the ‘‘constitutional settlement of 27 bce’’ was a monolith. In fact its origins are to be sought, as the coin shows, a year earlier (Rich and Williams 1999). Who knows what this sort of study might reveal, drawing on the vast body of material already known but only superficially explored? The work of Sabine MacCormack (1981) is just one example of what can be done with rigorous attention to the nuances of coin evidence.
Work on mint output has revealed the possibilities of addressing coin types in quantity. The question of who initiated designs is irrelevant - we can at least say that no coin presents the emperor in a negative light - and it is an obvious inference that the content of the coinage was subject to high-level review. Thus coins have their role
Figure 2.2 Aureus of Octavian 28 bce. The obverse shows the head of Augustus with the legend imp. Caesar Divi f. cos. vi, the reverse shows Augustus seated with scrinium and the legend leges et iura R. P. restituit (BMC 1995-4-1-1). Photo courtesy of the British Museum
To play in the study of imperial self-representation, and this has been taken up in an important article based on the silver coins (Norena 2001).
For the provinces much basic work remains to be done. The older catalogues and ‘‘corpora’’ are all incomplete, having foundered under the sheer mass of material, and long out of date. There are significant studies ofindividual mints in the provinces, e. g. Corinth (Amandry 1988), Thessalonica (Touratsoglou 1988), Smyrna (Klose 1987), Anazarbos (Ziegler 1993), Balkan mints (Schonert-Geiss 1965, 1970, 1975, 1987, 1991; Youroukova 1973, 1982) and Asian mints (von Aulock 1968, 1969, 1970, 1977, 1979, 1980), and ofindividual problems (Howgego 1985 on countermarks; Johnston 1985 on portraits, etc.), but these only scratch the surface. Plenty of mints await the detailed study that would constitute dissertation work if numismatics had the relationship it deserves to the mainstream of classical studies.
World History
