Conclusion

The outlines of the imperial coinage are becoming tolerably clear, and the effort required to refine the picture of production and impact is staggering. It might seem that the investment of effort has reached the point of diminishing returns: hardly anyone outside the field appreciates the labor involved in producing even the simplest mint study, which involves internal comparison of a mint’s products and their arrangement by die. These have to be viewed in person or in reproduction not only in public and private collections, but ideally in the commercial auction literature as well; this last is often difficult to access and even offensive to some scholars. The nature of the case may require extension of the study beyond the confines of the mint, but in any case appreciation of the historical significance often involves immersion in geography, literature, archaeology, epigraphy, prosopography, even ancient religion.

So why does anyone pursue the study of coinage? At the most basic level, each coin represents a whole object produced by an artist - and how many of these do we possess in other media? - terse testimony not only to the bureaucratic state of mind but to contemporary artistic taste and accomplishment, even technical expertise. That alone might be regarded as sufficient. But there is one paramount consideration that sets coinage apart from other realia: its ‘‘official’’ character and its unique stature as primary source material. In the Roman world mainstream coinage was produced on high authority and by workmen whose output was carefully supervised and controlled; even in the provinces minters were responsible to local officials and ultimately to Roman magistrates as well. The consistency of the coinage is testimony to the control exercised over it. No imperial portrait or monument, not the SC de Pisone Patre or the Lex Irnitana (much less the text of, say, Cicero) has such proximity to its source or is so inherently entitled to authority. With this in mind numismatists will continue to go about their work, attempting to set out the evidence to facilitate its proper employment in writing the history of the Roman world.