Get a tissue, Valens!

I guess I should have some educational content here, too. Valentinian came to power after the mysterious death of Jovian, and he decided to share power with his brother Valens, giving him control of the eastern half of the empire. Valens would hold this position from 364-378 CE, when he was killed by the Goths in the disastrous Battle of Adrianople.

We don't know the contemporary name of this denomination, but modern writers usually referred to as a siliqua. It's often said to be worth 1/24th of a gold solidus, but that's based on the assumption that the ratio of the value of gold to silver was accurate in Diocletian's price control edict and that it didn't change during the fourth century. But there's plenty of examples of the relative values of gold and silver fluctuating in history, and there's no guarantee that Diocletian was basing his price ceilings on any more than tummy feels.

Regarding the imagery, imperial portraits started to become rather standardized in the latter 3rd century AD, with portraits more seeming to be of "the emperor" rather than the specific person on the throne. They're not necessarily always perfectly identical, but if you look at a typical coin of Constantine, Constantius II, or Theodosius, you'll see a guy who looks a hell of a lot like this. In the 4th century, the standard headgear of laurel wreaths or radiate crowns went away, and we start seeing diadems, this one likely representing one made of pearls. The figure on the reverse is again the emperor, and he's holding what's called a labarum, which is a military standard with Christian imagery. In his other hand, he's holding a globe, representing the world, and on top of that the personification of victory. The inscription around all that declares him the restorer of the republic. Roman coins were never subtle, and they only got less so in the 4th century.

To further complicate the already complicated Roman coinage situation I've talked about before, coins minted with the approval of the Imperial government weren't the only coins taking an active part in the Roman economy.

It shouldn't surprise you that there were counterfeits made for profit. The usual way of doing that is to make a blank out of a cheap metal, then wrap it in a layer of silver or gold foil and strike it. If you pull it off right, it should look like a legitimate precious metal coin until it takes some wear or someone makes a test cut to check its contents (something you see commonly on Classical Athenian tetradrachms by rarely see by the Imperial Roman period). This kind of forgery is called a fourrée, and you can see an example mimicking a denarius of Trajan (reigned 98-117 CE) above. These are hard to date, since while the government would normally depict the current emperor or if they were depicting a former one, make it clear that it's a posthumous thing, there's nothing stopping a forger from making a coin depicting whoever whenever. If anything, going a bit back might make the forgery more believable, since it's harder to tell if a forget got the style wrong if you don't normally see real examples (assuming you didn't just steal official dies, something that happened sometimes). The inscription makes reference to Trajan's Dacian campaign, so it couldn't be from earlier than 102 CE, but otherwise I wouldn't date this as anything narrower than "probably second century CE." This one was not made from official dies, as it contains typos that are otherwise unattested (like "SPR" rather than "SPQR" on the reverse), though there are rare cases of official coins having errors like that.

The next two coins are something more interesting to me, as there's a good argument to be made that they would never have fooled anyone into thinking they were official and never had any intention to do so. These things are usually called "barbarous radiates," though "barbarous" is used as a label for crude style rather than who made them, which was almost certainly Roman citizens. The usual thought¹ about why these exist is that when Aurelian conquered the breakaway "Gallic Empire" in 274 CE, he closed the Trier mint. This meant that there was suddenly a lower supply of imperial coinage making it into northern Gaul and Britain. So the locals decided that if Rome wasn't going to give them the small change they needed to deal with the coin shortage they were experiencing, then they'd just solve the problem themselves. Thus, we have these crude, often rather small imitations of Roman coins. In the last picture, you can see my smallest example on top of an official coin that was already on the small end for an official issue. That little guy is really thin, too, and I think it weighed around 1 gram when I checked (I need to dig up that scale to confirm), less than half of even the lightest official issues. And the unofficial status of this coin was even more obvious if you were literate, as I'm pretty sure whoever carved that die wasn't, giving us some gibberish that looks like "IIIIVV" on it. These usually are imitations of Gallic coins, though sometimes you find imitations of a posthumous coin of Claudius II Gothicus, like the third coin in the pictures. Production of coins like these tapered off as more official mints were opened in Gaul and Britain.

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1. It's important to keep in mind that these are completely unmentioned in any literary source, so it's hard to know much for sure about them. There have been suggestions that these were made while the Gallic Empire was still active, and I've seen at least one person suggest they kept making these for centuries. It should be noted that we often find these in hoards with official Roman coins, and to my knowledge, we haven't seen them otherwise mixed in with much later coins, at least not without Roman coins also being there, so I definitely lean against that latter idea. What I'm presenting is the framework that makes the most sense to me on these things, but this is an area where the right archaeological find or the right scholarly analysis could end up completely changing how we see these things.

One thing that surprises a lot of people when they learn about the Roman economy is that there wasn't really a unified coinage system until around 298 CE. That was partially due to practical "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" reasons. After all, as long as Rome itself received the correct amount silver in taxation, why would they care what Joeus Schmous exchanged to buy wine in Antioch after it was conquered? And besides, shipping small change across the empire is expensive, so why not just have the locals keep handling it and spare the expense?

But what might surprise you is not just that it took centuries for these local coinages to be phased out, but the number of such coinages increased for most of this period. Why? Partially it was a civic pride thing. We see inscriptions of cities bragging about having permission to mint their own coins. But it could also be profitable. We have inscriptions of laws specifically forbidding someone from using silver to pay for something priced in bronze and vice versa. You needed to visit a city run money changer, get your coins converted, and pay a percentage for the privilege. And you probably wouldn't have much of an option about that if you travelled to a new city. You had to physically carry pieces of metal with you if you wanted to move wealth around, and not only would doing so be a lot easier if you converted what you had to the much more value dense silver and gold coins, but if you were also from a locality that made its own local bronzes, there was no guarantee that anyone at your destination would accept them as payment.

Terminology is inconsistent for those coins. Older sources call them "Greek Imperial Coins," since the vast majority were made in Greek speaking areas and contained Greek inscriptions, collectors tend to use "Roman Provincial Coins," and modern academics tend to prefer "Roman Civic Coins." And what exactly counts as a proper official "Roman Imperial Coin" and something provincial/Greek/civic is also pretty fuzzy, as the central government clearly was involved in production of some of these coins sometimes. In the picture above, that small green coin is from Antioch on the Orontes,¹ and you'll notice it has the Latin letters SC on the reverse, something common for bronze coins from this city. This stands for "Senatus Consultum," which normally is used for something the senate of Rome ordered. Presumably this means there was some sort of formal decree allowing these coins or something, but we don't have any further record.

So what do I mean by "semi-compatible?" Rome still wanted specific amounts of silver, and they based this on their own coinage system. Those few cities allowed to strike silver would adjust their silver coins to convert easily to denarii (probably under Imperial direction). Like the one silver coin above is a four drachma coin from Alexandria in Egypt from the reign of Nero, and it had the silver content and value of one imperial denarius. However, one city's drachma wasn't necessarily worth another city's drachma, and if I recall correctly, Antioch's 4 drachma coins were trading as 3 denarii of value at this time. But in any case, this did mean that local bronze coinages did have specific exchange rates to the denarius. You might not be able to spend one city's assarion at another, but you might know that your local city could exchange 16 of them for a denarius, and you'd know that another city would take that denarius and exchange it for 24 bronze obols, both rates being pretty set in stone. And most silver could be spent over a fairly large area.

So why did this complicated system end? For the most part, you can see production of these coins drop off in the mid third century, almost all of them ceasing by the end of the reign of Gallienus (253-268). This was a period where the empire was producing a huge number of small, mostly bronze coins itself to its armies who were stationed all over the empire. A city couldn't just deny proper imperial coinage, and it'd be easy for it to overwhelm local production, particularly if inflation was high. General economic problems in the empire may also have made the acquisition of materials and the production of coins less affordable. The last hold out was Egypt, which had always had a semi-separate economy from the rest of the empire as part of Imperial policy since Augustus. But after a failed rebellion against Diocletian that ended in 298, they were forced to adopt the empire's standard coinage. Though strangely, when Anastasius reformed the coinage in 498, the mint in Alexandria put out different denominations than the other mints of the empire, so there still may have been some level of intentional separation that isn't obvious in the archaeological and literary record until then.

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1. There were not only multiple Antiochs, but multiple that made their own local coinage in the Roman Empire. This particular example is from the most famous city with that name and probably the one you're thinking of, but the third coin on the top row is from Pisidian Antioch, a settlement in south western Turkey that was founded as a colony by Roman soldiers, which is reflected by this being the one coin here with a Latin inscription.

So in the third century AD, when Caracalla was the sole emperor (211-217 CE), Rome started producing these silver coins that depicted the emperor with a specific pointy crown (and on occasions where they instead depicted the empress, she's in front of a specific crescent moon shape). They are completely unmentioned by any surviving literary source.

"Actually," a hypothetical reader with knowledge of the less popular periods of Roman history and their sources might say, "the Historia Augusta references these coins as the 'antoninianus.'" And to that I say: maybe sort of? It makes reference to coins of that name in different points in the text, but it also says those coins are gold, and gold coinage was pretty steady and relatively unchanging through the range of anyone named "Antoninus" like Caracalla was. So I'd already say it's a weird, botched reference at best, but that source is also awful. It internally claims that it was written by 6 different authors in the early 4th century, but not only has analysis of the text shown that it's in fact probably just one author much later who often quoted from other sources, it's also usually considered one of the least reliable sources out of the ancient world. Like it even has a section where someone talks about how a historian should just make shit up to fill in gaps, and it's been suggested that it might have been intended to be a work of satire. But in any case, collectors have generally adopted the term "antoninianus" (or more casually "ant"), though academic sources tend use "radiate" or "radiate denarius."

So what the fuck do we know about these coins? There's precedent for this radiate crown to be a symbol of two of something, as it was a marker on the dupondius, a coin worth two asses, and it would later be used to help distinguish a double sestertius from a regular sestertius. So it's generally agreed that these were coins worth two denarii. When you combine that with the fact they had the silver content of 1.5 denarii, these were probably a cost saving measure. They realized they could pay their soldiers their denarius based wages for 25% less silver as long as they maintained the exchange rate to the gold aureus at 25 denarii. We don't have direct record of the public or military's reaction to this, but we do know that they stopped production of these early in the reign of everyone's favorite gender nonconforming emperor, Elagabalus (218-222). The rightmost coin in the photos above is one of those early coins of Elagabalus. The usual thought is that they stopped producing the coins due to the fact that people weren't happy getting less silver, and they could afford to make the change to boost the popularity of this usurper, but it's not something we can really know for sure.

But that was only a temporary hiatus, as Rome's finances only got worse in the third century. When Balbinus and Pupienus managed to take power power briefly when they revolted against Maximinus in 238, they reintroduced the coin, and it was here to stay for most of the century. Those two were succeeded in less than four months by the boy emperor Gordian III, who's depicted on the middle left coin in the picture, and it was during this reign that these coins largely displaced the denarius as the standard silver coin of the empire. As the financial woes of the empire got worse the solution was to keep reducing the weight and silver content of this coin. It got particularly bad during the reign of Gallienus (253-268), when Postumus declared himself emperor and took over much of Western Europe. This meant that Postumus had control of Spanish silver, so his coins had a higher though still diminishing silver content than the empire proper. The bottom left coin is an example of one of those Postumus coins with a "high" silver content, and mid right is an unusually big and nice looking Gallienus coin. The latter may look silvery, but at this point, they started applying a silver outer layer to these coins to make them appear more valuable, and that layer is unusually intact here. But as Postumus' position fell apart, and the so called "Gallic Empire" shrank in size and lost control of those mines, their coin quality deteriorated, too, and you can see an almost entirely copper example of this denomination from the reign of Tetricus (271-274) in the bottom right.

And that top coin there? That might actually be an entirely different denomination. We're not really sure. What happened is that during the reign of Aurelian, (270-275), there was some kind of coinage reform. There were now coins with your usual pointy crowned emperor, they were heavier, had a slightly increased amount of silver, and they had "XXI" on the bottom of the reverse.¹ What you think "XXI" means is going to tell you how much of a change this was. It's usually agreed that it's expressing a ratio of 20:1. 20 of what to 1 of what? Exactly the kind of question you throw at numismatists to get them into an argument. The two main ideas are these:

1. It's a statement of value. As the standard unit of account during periods when we have good sources is the sestertius, what it's saying is "one of these coins is worth 20 sestertii." This would mean it's worth 5 denarii, or 2.5 of whatever the hell you want to call these other coins I talked about.

2. It's a statement of fineness. It's saying the coins are 20 parts copper to one part silver. This is just about what these coins have averaged out to in modern analysis, and it was actually higher than what was in "silver" coins for a while.

To further complicate matters, the emperor Tacitus (who may or may not have claimed descent from the historian) issued some of these with an "XI" mark instead. My understanding is that those XI coins do have double the silver content of XXI coins, which I think fits better with the second hypothesis, as otherwise it'd be doubling costs while halving face value, but it's hardly out of the question that it was an attempt to make the unit of a denarius worth something again. Another thing I think fits better with the second is that Diocletian issued a price control edict in 301 that was written under the assumption that the denarius, not the sestertius, was the unit of account. While that was after another coinage reform that saw the end of this specific denomination, I feel like there's a good chance that swap had already occurred. But really, we could easily find a papyrus tomorrow that casually mentions these were supposed to be able to buy 21 fresh eggs or something. We're working with very fragmentary information, so we can only have so much confidence in any of our conclusions.

And these coins also taught me that I really shouldn't just trust coin collectors' personal websites for accurate information on Roman coinage. When I first got into these, I remember reading that Aurelian's reform stabilized the coinage, ending the constant debasement and probably controlling inflation. But then I started reading academic sources, and while I don't remember which one specifically first told me this, it basically said something like "we have plenty of surviving papyri that give us prices from Roman Egypt. Inflation actually doesn't seem bad for most of the third century. But then Aurelian's reform happened, and there's suddenly hyperinflation. He unpegged the value of the gold aureus from other coinage and let the price float freely, and that just wiped out the value of other coins."

Let me know if you found any of that interesting. I don't actively collect anymore due to concerns about the ethics of the ancient coin trade, but I still have a lot of coins I can show off and talk about.

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1. If you want to impress a coin nerd friend, this area is referred to as the "exergue."