What ancient is this?

It's a superb portrayal of Mars - typically the reverses are weak on these folles. Finding one with great style and a strong strike is tough.

 

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$230 seems steep but it is a good looking coin. Cheapskate me paid $75 for this lesser one which is Augustus rather than Caesar. AE1 Constantines are worth seeking out. My favorite below is from the period he was getting along with Maxentius who issued it in his honor.


Denominations tended to shrink and be replaced with a new coin rated at a higher value which would shrink and be replaced again. A lot of coins would have been called in and melted to make the new currency. I wonder how many of our Indian head cents have metal in them that used to be half cents? Inflation was fast and gaining speed throughout the 'Late Roman' period. Gao did a good job of summarizing what we don't know all that well.

 

duplicate post

 

sorry for the late response, and thanks everyone for the detailed explanations, especially Gao, made it abundantly clear.

I got more questions

The diocletian current reform introduced a new set of currency values, in which the denarius became the smallest unit. I don't understand how they had transitioned/facilitated this exchange.

I mean, sure the high value coins were defunct and not in general circulation, but that shouldn't mean they didn't exist. Treasury of a town or region government for example, greater sums of wealth, weren't they still represented in gold and silver coins?

Did they organize some nation-wide exchange program? There had to be some sort of procedures during these currency reformations? They had to get the gold and silver back into stock to strike new coins?
Can imagine the empire had to absorb a substantial loss to eliminate the antoninuous, to change denarius' value seemed almost inconceivable.

The other question. Since these follis were different denominations all carrying relatively small face values, how were people contemporary to their circulation able to differentiate them? Especially before the Anastasius reform, before they had value engraved. Wouldn't it be confusing having to explain to each customer that a particular coin they had submitted, given its size, was actually the lower denomination?
And again, when Anastasius issued new bronze with values marked, did he have to eliminate all the follis in circulation?

 

I don't think the denarius' value changed under Diocletian. The smalles coins that had been made regularly had been worth at least 2 denarii* for years. The middle coin in Diocletian's bronze/billon coinage scheme was the same size as these antoniniani and had very similar designs, though without the silver content. There's a good chance that those coins were the direct replacement for antoniniani and were pegged at the same value. If that's the case, then older antoniniani would still have a clear place in circulation and wouldn't have to be specifically withdrawn, at least early on.

One interesting thing is the possibility that Diocletian actually increased the value of the denarius with his reform: you find some people that think both the antoniniani after Aurelian's reforms and the initial large follis under Diocletian were worth 5 denarii. If that's true, then a denarius was worth a decent amount more silver than before. I don't think this is the case, if nothing else because it would drastically increase costs during economic problems, but he wouldn't have been the first to do something like this with the denarius, and I'm not sure if it would have been much dumber a decision than Licinius cutting the value of money in half.

As for how they replaced old coins during reforms, a lot of it was probably through taxation. People can only pay taxes with what they have saved, so a lot of people wouldn't have much of a choice. There could also have been some pressure on tax collectors to try to collect older coins when possible, but I don't think we have any record of that happening, so that's just speculation. Beyond that, to my knowledge, we don't have much concrete information.

I'm actually really curious myself as to how older coins interacted in the economy. I recall reading an Egyptian contract, I think from the third century, that noted that a payment was made with "coins of good silver," so there were certainly still obsolete coins being used, but it's hard to tell whether the economy had decided on some sort of specific value for them or treated them as bullion after a certain point. It's really hard to tell what they did with bronze coins. I have to wonder if there weren't parts of the empire that just treated all smaller bronze coins as essentially the same, whether they were minted under Constantine or Theodosius or were obviously crude, unofficial copies. The existence of that last category indicates to me that the value of coins didn't just come from from any guarantee of exchange with precious metals or a government's backing, so it's quite possible that not all markets used the values the government assigned.

It's not entirely clear how people at the time could tell how much a given coin was supposed to be worth. The literacy rate was low enough that it can't have just been by the emperor's name or something. I'd guess it was often based on reverse designs, which tended to be much fewer in number than in previous periods. Though there was a law issued in the 4th century that stated that people weren't allowed to treat the value of gold coins differently based on the size of the imperial portrait, so there seemed to have been some confusion among the public about what mattered on a coin.

Anastasius' reform was actually pretty simple. For a long time before that, bronze coins were all these tiny, worthless looking things, and there didn't seem to be much variation. In fact, they were often exchanged in unopened bags rather than bare coins. Anastasius simply gave these coins the value of 1 nummus, and minted larger coins for multiples of that.

*The post reform antoniniani of Aurelian might have increased in value as well as size and fineness, but it's not certain. Because of this, you'll sometimes see coins after this reform called "aureliani."

 

Hello!

Im a new member in here. Recently I've got a Julius Caesar denarius with an elephant on it (image attached). But the one I have has 3 letters resembling VRL on the back side of it. Does it mean that it's fake?

Thanks!

 

i know there's a reproduction of this coin with some initials on it, but I don't remember which letters - they were placed towards the edge of the coin outside the regular strike.

 

Could you get a picture of the actual coin you have? Also, this would probably make sense as its own thread.

 

Alas, it is probably stamped "WRL". That is the acronym for Westair Reproductions Ltd. Based in Birmingham, UK, they manufacture replica coins

http://www.westair-reproductions.com/Roman/Caesar Coin Pack - Denarius.html

 

Thank you all for answering my post and providing the information. It is definitely WRL. Widh I had a genuine coin

All the best!