Roman Republican Currency - Sources of Evidence

Sources of Evidence

The dates on all the coins mentioned above can not be known with absolute certainty. Sometimes particular coins can be linked to a well defined event in history, e.g. the "dict perpet" denarii of Caesar can be dated very closely to his assassination, but this is rarely the case. Much dating of the coinage is based on evidence from coin hoards. The hoarding of coins, especially by burial, was a "banking system" often used in ancient times, particularly in times of crisis; hoarding during the civil war between Caesar and Pompey was so extensive that it resulted in a liquidity crisis. Hoards can present evidence in several ways

• The location of the hoard can speak to where the coins in question circulated.
• The archaeological context of a coin hoard can set an approximate date for the production of the coinage. As an example, excavations of the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus uncovered coins beneath the temple; the date the temple was built is known and so a terminus ante quem for the period of their production can be deduced.
• The differential wear of coins in a hoard can be used to establish a relative chronology. Coins that had circulated longer prior to burial should show more wear.
• The composition of the hoard in terms of coin types can speak to what sorts of coins circulated in the same place at the same time and their relative abundance. From this, relative chronologies can sometimes be extracted.
• Comparison of multiple coin hoards can help to establish relative chronologies; if a series of coins is well represented in one large coin hoard and some are missing from a second large hoard, it is likely that they were minted after that hoard was buried.

Despite all of this, the evidence remains unclear. In this case, numismatic scholars attempt to make their best estimate of the absolute and relative chronology. In English, the current standard work is Crawford 1974 which built on and superseded the work of Sydenham 1952, Grueber 1910, Babelon 1886, and Mommsen 1850. The chronology used by this article and the identification of coins by the label Crawford xx/yy (or Crxx/yy) identifies a particular item in that catalogue. There is however newer evidence, particularly in the period 170–149 BC, where analysis of the recently discovered Mesagne hoard has led to the alternate chronologies of Hersh & Walker 1984, and Harlan 1995. An alternate naming of the coinage of the form "gens ##" (e.g. "Fabia 11" for the 11th coin minted by a moneyer of the gens Fabia; i.e. Cr268/1) is also sometimes still used. This was devised by Babelon and used by Grueber, Sydenham, and many newer books.