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Roman literary Evidence on the Coinage
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2012
Extract
A good deal of confusion has been caused in the discussion of the Roman monetary system by the attempt to restrict the term ‘denarius’ to a particular ‘denarius nummus.’ The word ‘denarius’ is, of course, primarily an adjective, and was applied to many other things as well as nummi: and even in the latter connexion it could be used to describe any nummus that was valued at the rate of ten units. There were ‘denarii nummi’ recognised in Roman business long before there was any Roman coinage: according to Livy (viii, II), in 340 B.C the Campanians were ordered to furnish ‘denarios nummos’ as pay, which must mean Campanian staters reckoned as ten Roman Asses. It is true that the name got popularly attached to the nummus which was marked with a sign of value, X; but it was not till some years after the first coining of this ‘nummus’ that it was so nicknamed: in the beginning it was known as the ‘bigatus.’ For the sake of precision, this coin will be called the X-denarius.
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- Copyright © J. G. Milne 1938. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies
References
1 For discussion of the text of this passage, see CR, l (1936), 215Google Scholar.
2 The passage in Festus, p. 347 (M.) s.v. ‘sestertii,’ which has been supposed to refer to a revaluation of bronze against silver under a lex Flaminia, is not quoted, as all the crucial words are conjectures with no ancient authority, and do not appear in Lindsay's text.
3 Gesch. des ält. röm. Münzw. 45.
4 For instances, see the Cervetri hoard (of which some details are given in BMC Roman Republic, i, p. xxi) for an early hoard, and for a later one E. T. Newell Two boards from Minturnae (Amer. Num. Soc. monograph), in one of which were mixed examples of ‘semilibral,’ ‘sextantal,’ and ‘uncial’ weights.
5 The date of the Romano-Campanian coinage seems to be between 300 and 270 B.C. One of the most definite pieces of evidence has been curiously misunderstood by Messrs. Mattingly, and Robinson, (‘The Date of the Roman Denarius,’ Brit. Acad. Proc. xviii, 1932, 240Google Scholar). On some issues there is a system of mint-marking which is found also on a Ptolemaic series which began probably in 270, and they argue that the Italians borrowed this system from Egypt. But there is no other instance of any kind of borrowing by Italy from Egypt about this time, while Alexandria was importing men, including artists, and ideas freely from Sicily and Italy in the reign of Philadelphus: so that it is most probable that the system in question was an Italian one copied in Egypt, and that therefore the Romano-Campanian issues on which it occurs are earlier than 270.
6 The history of the gold coinage in England supplies an instructive parallel. So long as the gold was struck as a supplement to the silver, which was the standard metal in England, it was impossible for the nominal value to be maintained: even when James I, after reducing the weight of his gold ‘unite’ from 172 grains to 154 in 1604, and then to 140 in 1619, tried to secure the acceptance of the last at a fixed rate by marking it with the value mark of xx, it was continually quoted at a higher value, often twenty-three shillings or even more. It was not till 1816 that the government solved the difficulty of expressing sterling, a silver standard, in gold, by fixing an artificial price, much above the economic one, for gold: and this broke down when other parties were prepared to pay a still higher artificial price. But obviously the Roman government could not have done this in regard to silver.
7 So the purchasing power of the English gold sovereign went down as its metal value rose after the War.
8 Livy xxxiii, 23; xxxiii, 37; xxxiv, 10; xxxvi, 21.