Conveners
S42. ROME 8. GOLD IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE
- George A. Green (Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford)
A large data set of LA-ICP-MS analyses of Roman gold coins sheds light on the development of gold coinage under the Republic and the Early Empire. As is well known, gold coinage was a latecomer in Roman monetary history and large issues remained rare until the age of Caesar. After Caesar however, gold coinage became a regular feature of the Roman monetary system. This major change in the...
With Money and Government in the Roman Empire (1994), Richard Duncan-Jones revolutionized ancient economic history by estimating the value of coinage in circulation in the mid-second century CE Roman empire through numismatic and statistical methods. His work implied an anomalously high monetization ratio for an ancient economy, given past and current estimates of Roman GDP. This paper offers...
In a 2013 paper (`What happened to gold coinage in the 3rd c. A.D.?’, JRA 26) I showed that while gold coins of this period are scarce as single finds and in hoards, die-studies show that production was as high as in the 2nd century. Aurei ceased to be struck to a consistent weight standard at this time, pointing to a change in their use. It was suggested that the State became better at...
Intensive study in recent years of Roman gold coins found in the Barbaricum has fundamentally altered our understanding of their presence and prominence here, as well as our knowledge of the periods when they arrived. Moreover, the finds of Roman gold coins in former barbarian territories are key to understanding certain economic processes in the Roman Empire. An example is a hypothesis of A....
