I am sure that Concerned Ape was really trying to make the worlds best war game about farming.

NAPOLEON IS MASTER OF EUROPE
ONLY ONE PERSON WHO GOT A FARM FROM A GRANDAD WITH A MESSED UP BED STANDS AGAINST HIM
FARMS ARE NOW BATTLEFIELDS

I for one am happy that someone finally realized the most exciting part of the history of Roman warfare was when the emperor Diocletian retired to farm cabbages.

Once upon a time, there were a bunch of city states whose populations had some shared ancestry, close enough dialects that they could understand each other, and some shared religious ideas and mythology. They didn't consider themselves the same people as each other, but they still considered themselves something closer to each other than other societies around, so they were the Greeks, and the others barbarians.

But then one of them conquered the rest, and his son Alexander conquered a lot of other people, and a more unified identity started to form. They started thinking of themselves as a common people with a common culture, and maybe they'd have a shared destiny.

But then a different group took them. Armies from Italy calling themselves Romans, a group that might have once been considered a multi-ethnic people, but the other Latins and even the Oscan and Etruscan were already fading into this identity. And the Greeks tended to get along well in this empire. Caracalla made them all citizens in the early third century AD (along with all other freeborn men in the empire). A century after that, authors tell us that if you asked most Greek speaking people in the empire what they were, they'd say they were Roman.

Things got a little weird when the Western half of the empire fell. Greek was already dominant in the eastern part of the empire, but it started making more sense to shift laws from Latin to Greek, since far more Romans could speak that language when the Westerners weren't Roman anymore. And for a while, the West called those Greek speakers Romans as well. But Western their stories about the history of the Romans became more legendary and idealized, and as the remaining Roman empire shifted in culture as all people do, they started to doubt their "Romanness." The pope ended up crowning some guy named Charlemagne as the new Roman Emperor, much to the confusion of the people who had been the Romans for centuries. And since it didn't make sense for Westerners to be the successors to the Romans when there were still Romans, they reverted to an old name for those guys over out East: the Greeks.

The Romans who spoke Greek didn't consider themselves the same as the Romans who spoke Latin's descendants (and later German), and they started talking about those Latins as uncouth barbarous people who weren't like the Romans at all. Still, they called on those primitive Latins to help them reconquer some territory from the Turks, and those Latins took it much farther than intended and kept much of the former Roman lands they took. Things fell apart between the Romans who spoke Greek and the Westerners who considered themselves the real successors of Rome, culminating in the Latins conquering the Roman capital Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade. Those conquerors declared themselves the Roman Empire. The surviving Greek speakers who set up government elsewhere insisted they were still the Roman Empire. And the Germans called themselves the Holy Roman Empire. None of them contained the city of Rome.

Those Greek speaking Romans whose distant, distant ancestors considered themselves Greek did retake their city, but the empire slowly declined until it was taken over by the Ottomans. But those conquered people still considered themselves the Romans. And there were those who wanted independence for the surviving Roman people. But that needed Western support, which was difficult as the Westerners didn't like those "Byzantines" and thought that culture was decadent and the people slimy and treacherous. But do you know what Westerners liked? Those extinct ancient people called Greeks.

And so those working for independence started insisting they were the people of Pericles, Leonidas, and the glory of an ancient, idealized past. And plenty of those now being labelled Greeks hated it. They were Romans. Proud orthodox Christian people following the glory of Constantine, Justinian, Heraclius, and Basil II Porphyrogenitus. They had nothing to do with those ancient pagans. They didn't even speak the same language! You could get trilingual dictionaries that translated between Greek, Latin, and "Romanish," the language that descended from Greek that modern Romans spoke.

But being Greek brought support. And propaganda started changing minds. The people whose parents called themselves Romans started liking those old Greeks. They stopped talking about them the way we talk about the Ancient Egyptians. Now they were their ancestors and the originators of their culture. Romanish was just modern Greek. And that big empire that lasted after the West fell? Totally Greek. Not Roman at all. After all, if those people were Roman, they wouldn't be the ancestors of the people who were now obviously Greek.

Things like nations and ethnicity aren't just constructs, they're weird and far from static.

One of the most common coin types from the ancient world depicts a guy falling off a horse and getting stabbed surrounded by the legend "FEL TEMP REPARATIO," meaning "the return of fortunate times." Since the stabber was a Roman soldier and the stabbee clearly a barbarian (note the "Phrygian Cap" on the fallen figure on the two larger coins, marking him as foreign), it was the Imperial government's statement that "no seriously, we're properly dealing with invaders this time." I kind of wonder if these coins raised a lot of questions already answered by the coins.

These coins were part of a coinage reform made under the joint rule of Constantius II and Constans I, Constantine's younger two sons (he put his eldest, Crispus, to death, and the next oldest, Constantine II, tried to conquer Constans' territory and died in the process) in around 340. There seemed to have been at least three bronze or heavily debased silver coins at first, all of which are in the top row. Our sources mention denominations called the "centenionalis" and "pecunia maiorina" around this time, but it's not clear which specific coins they're referring to.¹ The third coin contains the same message on the reverse, though it depicts the emperor standing on a galley, holding a globe representing the world on which there is a phoenix, probably reinforcing the idea of a restoration of strength from the ashes of bad days, and the emperor's other hand holding a standard with a symbol of Christianity. The far right coin has a reverse where two personifications of victory hold wreaths together, and around them a legend meaning roughly "the victory of our lords and emperors."

But while that falling horseman design is common on coins, you rarely see examples as big as those first two coins of mine. Like so many other times in history, the imperial government dealt with financial shortfalls by shrinking their coins and reducing silver content. The bottom two coins are probably the same denomination as those big ones, just from a few years later. And as you might expect, those two smaller denominations in the first row quickly stopped being made as inflation and shrinking horseman coins made them kind of useless. While they stopped making this reverse design after Constantius II's reign, it's not clear which, if any, bronze coins were continuations of the same denomination or new denominations. 4th Roman century coinage has a lot of mysteries and ambiguities.

One other thing is that I think this picture is a good place to talk about how much the images on hand carved dies could vary. All but that rightmost coin with the victories on it depicts the same man, Constantius II, with that final one depicting Constans I. But by this point, imperial portraiture was more concerned with depicting "the emperor" than the specific person on the throne, so portraits of those two brothers basically look identical. But look at the two big coins in particular. If I didn't know about this, I would have assumed those were supposed to be two different guys. What you're seeing is the difference between how a die carver in Constantinople and one in Thessalonica carved the same portrait. Different mints have different house styles, and those who really get into a period of Roman coinage can often tell at a glance where a coin was made just by the portrait. I can do that myself a little bit for coins of Diocletian's tetrarchy, and I might make a post with more detail about that later.

I also want to point out that I'm not sure that bottom left coin is an official issue. The proportions on Constantius' face make it look almost like a Moai head to me, and I haven't seen any other that quite looks like that. It could just be that a new guy at the mint carved it weird, but we do know that there were some "barbarous" copies of coins of this period, probably made unofficially to deal with local coin shortages, something I talked more about here.

1. "Pecunia maiorina" just means "big coin," and our only reference to them comes from Constantius II declaring them demonetized in 354. This may refer to the earlier, bigger falling horsemen coins, but it could also refer to the larger coins the usurper Magnentius minted, or it could refer to the older coins of Diocletian and his tetrarchy. It could even be a general descriptor rather than a specific denomination and referred to more than one of those. It's a very ambiguous passage.

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.