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.

There were a lot of changes to the Roman Empire during Diocletian's reign (284-305). The provinces and army were reorganized, there was a new governmental system where there were two senior emperors called Augusti and two junior emperors called Caesars, and most importantly for this post, a massive overhaul of Roman coinage. When he came to power, the coinage really consisted of heavily debased but theoretically silver radiate coins, gold coins whose weight was somewhat variable, and the local coinage of Egypt. And particularly after Aurelian unpinned the value of the gold aureus from the other coins, there was high inflation. Diocletian introduced a new silver coin that was basically an old fashioned denarius on the Neronian standard from 64 AD, and for lesser coinage, there was a small coin depicting the emperor with a laurel wreath, a new radiate coin that had no silver at all, and the big guys on the top row of those photos above, who had a small amount of silver and originally a thin silver wash that doesn't survive on most examples. Our sources refer to this big coin as the "nummus," which is just a word for coin.

It can be hard to tell how much a given ancient coin was worth if you don't have a clear literary source telling you, as it was uncommon to clearly label values for most of the Roman imperial period. But some of these coins had "XXI" on the bottom, and as I discussed in a post about another kind of coin, one possible reading of that is that this coin was worth 20 sestertii or 5 denarii. That combined with analysis of surviving prices in Egypt led to s scholarly consensus by the mid 20th century that these were worth 5 denarii, but the value assigned to them increased under Diocletian's successors, particularly Constantine I.

But artifacts don't give a flying fuck about how good and well reasoned your scholarship is, and in 1970, archaeologists found remnants of a monetary edict from September 301, well within Diocletian's reign, that states that the value of the nummus was being doubled to 25. Yes, that does mean it probably had the rather awkward value of 12 1/2 denarii at some point.¹ And yes, trying to solve inflation by declaring that everyone suddenly has twice as much money as before is the most galaxy brained economic decision I've ever heard. His price control edict wasn't effective or well thought out, either.

The top row are fairly typical examples of these nummi from Diocletian's reign. The first has the most common reverse type, depicting "the Genius of the Roman People," with a "Genius" being kind of like a male divine guardian spirit (a female one would be called a Juno). The second is basically "Juno, the Guardian of Money," and it's usually thought these started being struck after the price control and/or revaluation of the currency. The final is an unfortunately double struck personification of Carthage, the city this particular coin was minted in. I'm not sure why Carthage got a whole design around the mint location when everyone else just got a mint mark, but I appreciate that they added variety on a coinage series that otherwise is mostly small variations on two reverse types.

In 305, Diocletian did something completely unprecedented for an emperor: he retired. And he forced the other senior emperor, Maximian, to retire with him. And as Diocletian intended with his new four emperor system, the Caesars were promoted to Augusti, and two new Caesars were appointed. There was just one problem: Maximian and the new Augustus Constantius I each had a son, neither of which was promoted to Caesar. And those sons were pissed. One of those sons, Maxentius declared himself emperor in Rome and started striking his own coins, a broken example of which is the first in the bottom row, and the other did the same in Britain. And that other one was named Constantine, so you probably have an idea of how the following civil wars turned out.

Even without the break, that Maxentius coin is a bit thinner and lighter than those earlier coins. The economic problems in the empire didn't cease, and all parts of it shrank their coins and reduced the silver content to pay for their armies, and at least Constantine increased the value of the coins he was striking for the same reason. Eventually, Constantine was in control of the West, while a guy named Licinius was in control in the East. And Licinius was apparently as galaxy brained as Diocletian, because he decided the best way to bring in more coins from taxation was to cut the value of all coins in half. The second coin on the bottom row is from one of his mints, and it depicts his son, Licinius II. On the reverse, it has the marking XII^ on the field, which was how they wrote 12 1/2, the "restored" value. I remember reading about a surviving letter where someone was warning a friend to spend all his money as fast as possible before word of that edict otherwise reached his city, but I'm having trouble finding that right now. If you happen to know what source that would be, let me know in the comments, and I'll update this post with it.

As far as we can tell, Constantine's reduced, valued up version of the nummus continued into the reigns of his sons, with an even smaller example from early in the reign of his son Constantius II (reigned 337-361) in the bottom row of my pictures, third from the left. But there was a further coinage reform under the joint reign of Constantius II and Constans I, one we don't have much info about, but this is probably the end of Diocletian's nummus. However, you'll notice that there's still one coin left in my picture on the far right. Constantius II was succeeded by Julian II (361-363), a man raised as a Christian but converted to paganism, who tried and failed to revive the falling fortunes of the old religion. One thing he did was to issue coins of the same size and weight as Diocletian's. While it's unclear if taking the style of coins from a pagan emperor who was famously a persecutor of Christians was itself a statement or just a coincidence of economic intention, the imagery on the reverse of these coins is probably pagan. It's a bull standing under stars, and while it's usually labelled as the Egyptian deity Apis, I've also seen it suggested that it's a more generic image of an animal that would be recognized as intended for pagan sacrifices. The inscription surrounding means "security of the state," something he probably believed was helped by the revival of pagan practice. These new large coins never really caught on, and you see them rarely after Julian's reign, and never again with pagan imagery.

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1. This is particularly strange since we're pretty sure the smallest unit of currency at the time was worth 1 denarius. Fuck if I know what you would get as change if you spent one of these trying to buy something priced at 10 denarii or something. Though I did see an interesting suggestion on a coin message board once that it might have been treated as 12 when used for small amounts, but that a group of 8 of them together were treated as 100, and he gave an example from I think the Netherlands of something like that happening once, but this isn't something I've seen in academic sources.

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.