Back with another basic question for my own curiosity. Is there a good source that details the changes to fineness of Roman denarii over the course of time? I've seen rough figures thrown around but there must be a more definitive, authoritative compilation somewhere that narrows it down.
I just googled: silver purity roman This was on page 1: https://www.ngccoin.com/news/article/6842/NGC-ancient-coins/
Hi @Vess1, A basic search is a good place to start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denarius - Broucheion
Back in the day, Walker’s books on “The Metrology of the Roman Silver Coinage” (1976, 3 vols) was the authoritative word.
Thanks, I had read that article before. It's a general run down. Was looking for more info than that. Based on that article how much silver is in a denarius of Caracalla?
This chart contradicts the NGC article. It says they would have been 83% during the reign of Severus while the NGC article states they were debased to 57% at that time.
Wikipedia comes closest on average. The real figure is more nuanced because the amount of silver was quite variable during these years; sometimes going as low as 58% or as high as 97%. This suggests that the mints got by as best they could with what they had available. It wasn't as simple as new emperor shows up and says "ok boys, the new target is X" and they dialed in the new number. Metallurgy tech of this age was imprecise so you'd probably even find coins with significant deviations minted in the same batch. One way to confirm this would be to test die-matched coins. Hopefully I can do this at some point. Rasiel
