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healthcare bureaucrat in philly, v adhd, orthodox jew, ect ect, im love my wife



I'm currently reading Mary Beards amazing book from 2015, SPQR, and a really fascinating moment to me is when she reconstructs the economic situation of the Catiline conflict some 2000 years ago. The fact that we can do that is so cool! the tools she uses are really ingenious.

So! a fun thing about roman coinage is that it can be dated pretty precisely, people only held political office for one year and the officials in charge of coinage would "sign" the designs for their given year. Those designs would then be hand-cut onto stamps, and the minor differences between each stamp would be visible on the finished coin

.two roman era coins showing a woman casting a ballot in an election, there are minor differences in the design
here you can see both the signing (Longinus was the official who minted this batch of coins) and also the slight differences between stamps

How would those stamps be used? We have a tombstone engraving here which shows that one way would be for a hot piece of metal to be held by one person, the stamp placed over it, and another person would hit it with a hammer.
.a tombstone engraving showing people minting coins

this would of course wear out the stamp over time and as you saw above there was difference in the sharpness between those two coins indicating that one stamp was "fresher" than the other.

This all comes together in that archaeologists know roughly how many coins each stamp could make before wearing out! and if the archaeological record is rich enough they can roughly infer how many stamps were in use in a given year by the number of variations in that years coinage, so!!! they can roughly estimate how many coins were made in a given year relative to other years!

which, okay so, Catiline led a failed coup attempt in 63BCE after failing to secure consulship for the second time in a row. running for office at this time was obscenely expensive and he was in crushing debt as a result of loosing, but people fell into debt after failing to win office every year for hundreds of years and they had always just quietly shuffled off stage to quietly recoup their losses or uh fall into ruin, why is it that he decided instead to try to burn the city down? and why is it that his conspiracy gained a shockingly large number of co-conspirators? and why is it that after Cicero convinced the senate to exile him there was an army waiting at the doorsteps of Rome for Catiline to take charge of?

For most of history people looking back on this time would listen to Cicero (who, mind you, won the election that Catiline lost) who portrayed Catiline as just a greedy man surrounded by other greedy men at a time when faith in the systems holding society together were fraying.

but! if you look at the coinage what you find is that at this time there was a massive credit crunch! for whatever reason for the few years leading up to this crises there was a profound and noticeable drop in the amount of coins being made, so people with means found themselves short on cash and those with debt found themselves hounded by debtors who themselves were short on cash, everyone felt the crunch and Catiline's attempt to take the city by force (and that cities readiness to join him) begins to look a little different.

of course Cicero, who was famous for legal victories in a society that really only valued military victories, had every reason to want to make the most of the danger posed by Catiline and his conspiracy. it of course happened to be him that was targeted by the conspiracy, who uncovered it, who convinced the senate to do something about it, and who as Consul of the year ultimately defeated Catiline in battle. looking at the story from the other side and with the archeological evidence in hand makes you wonder how much of this was a genuine crises and how much of it was a conservative invention

anyways yeah no I really recommend this book haha


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in reply to @numberonebug's post:

nothing to apologize for

im not an economist so don't know much about that really, but you might be interested in the Price Edict from Diocletian setting maximum price limits for every good and service he could think of, which can give you a feel for what prices were like (though do note, nobody listened to this edict, it was largely unenforced). http://kark.uib.no/antikk/dias/priceedict.pdf

the book "The Size of the Economy and the Distribution
of Income in the Roman Empire" comes recommended but it's an economics text so idk if it's really worth anything

"The Monetary Systems of the Greeks and Romans" seems like a more grounded text that might be what you're looking for, focusing on money in specific, though again I haven't read it

yeah! hope that sets you on a fun path ^v^

idk is there a specific time period in their history that interests you or a specific aspect of how they related to money that interests you? the tricky thing about rome is that it's a like 2,000 year long story and everything changed very fluidly and very frequently so it's hard to talk about things with a broad brush haha

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