It is easy to see the Julio-Claudian aes as the successor to that of Augustus, whose emission from Rome seems guaranteed by the presence of the moneyers’ names. But as Grant (1946, 1953) showed long ago and has since been abundantly confirmed in Roman Provincial Coinage, traditional catalogues oversimplify the situation. Many regions of the empire did not even use the reformed denominations, much less the coins themselves. A glance through the plates of RPC suffices to dramatize the Roman indifference to the currency of outlying regions. In some cases - e. g. the ‘‘Altar’’ series of Lugdunum and the ‘‘Crocodiles’’ of Nemausus (Figure 2.1) - the mass ofcoin was about as great as that emanating from Rome. These large scale mints were joined, on occasion, by short-term ones, coining on the Roman standard, whose purpose is generally unclear.
Rome’s laissez-faire attitude towards monetary arrangements in the provinces is evident already in the republic, when for example Attalid cistophori continue to be the
Figure 2.1 ‘‘Crocodile’’ as from Nimes. The obverse shows heads of Agrippa and Augustus, back to back, with Agrippa facing left wearing a combined rostral crown and olive wreath. The head of Augustus is bare. The reverse shows a crocodile chained to a palm branch, evoking the conquest of Egypt (RIC Augustus n. 155 editor’s collection)
Currency of Asia long after its organization into a province. After some experimentation (C. E. King and D. R. Walker 1976) the coinage of Egypt stabilizes along Ptolemaic lines; other less isolated provinces continue to possess and produce their own silver.
The best summary of what can be known of the early provincial coinage is provided by RPC; where the volumes do not exist students have to rely on the rather uneven coverage provided by regional surveys, mint studies, or corpora. Already the arrangement of the material has departed from the traditional classification by ‘‘province’’ (Ionia, Caria, Lydia, etc.) to a more fluid one that recognizes regional influence and proximity of towns, a la Louis Robert; but for Asia the classification by conventus (provincial administrative center) is no improvement as a recognition of the authority behind issues. The picture will get more complicated still as RPC reaches the late second and third centuries; not only does the volume of material increase vastly (the editors of vol. 4, the Antonines, have recorded nearly 40,000 coins of over 12,000 types from 388 cities), but its interrelationship is marked by frequent die links between coins of different authorities - the ‘‘Werkstatte’’ identified by Kraft (1972; cf. Johnston 1974) whose products and relationship to one another has not been fully articulated.
The steady debasement of the imperial coinage must have had much to do with the collapse of the coinage in the provinces; presumably the baseness of the nominally silver coinage drove the heavier but nominally fractional denominations from circulation. By the reign of Gordian III, only Antioch and Caesarea in Cappadocia continued to produce silver (Bland 1991), and the number of authorities producing copper was declining from its peak under Septimius Severus. The period of greatest decline seems to have been the sole reign of Gallienus, when the silver coinage reached its nadir. Only a few mints continued to strike as late as Tacitus (275 ce) and the only one that continues beyond him is Alexandria, by now producing, albeit on a grand scale, only very debased tetradrachms. The coinage reform of Diocletian, which took effect in the west in early 293 and expanded eastward, introduced uniform denominations throughout the empire and brought an end to coinage in Alexandria, too.
The relationship of the provincial coinage to the mainstream gold and silver is not easily apprehended. There is some evidence for solicitation of permission to strike coins directly from the emperor (Robert 1960), but more likely the usual authority came from the provincial governor filtered through local magistrates. While the portrait of the emperor is the commonest obverse type, this is by no means as universal as it was at Rome, and boule, hiera synkletos, demos, and other personifications find their place: these of course are difficult to date with precision. The reverse types occasionally derive from Roman prototypes, but more often local gods and heroes, events and institutions dictate the themes.
As noted already, sometimes the mint of Rome itself engaged in producing provincial denominations, mainly in precious metal, so there must have been some apprehension at the center of needs on the periphery. But no analysis that sees the provincial money as centrally controlled, or contrarily as purely the product of local initiative, will be wholly satisfactory. On the whole there is better evidence for a local initiative (Harl 1987) than for central management (Price 1984). The answer lies somewhere in between, and has to be determined on a case-by-case basis.
World History
