Question About Roman Denarii and Parthian Drachmas

I am presently reading a book, Ancient Persia at War, and the author writes about something I find intriguing. During the reign of the Parthian King Phraates IV, Rome under the leadership of Triumvir Marc Antony invaded Parthia and was sent packing with heavy losses. According to this book the Parthians found a large quantity of Roman coins as a pay chest for the Roman troops. The Parthians then restamped and issued them to their own soldiers. If this is true does anyone know what the denarii originally looked like and what they might have looked like after the Parthians reissued them. How close would the weights of the denarius of ca. 40 BC have been compared to the Parthian drachmas of the same time period and, if very close, would simply giving them a counter strike be sufficient for Parthian purposes? Thanks for any info, (or just plausible speculation in a pinch will do).

 

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Well, I'm guessing based on the Braziian counterstamping of 8 reales to 960 reis crown during the 1810 - 1827? period, that at the very least the coins would have to be reheated in a furnace to soften them. Also ancients were routinely struck hot.

I'm not familiar with this incident although I've read that there was a currency crisis during the Imperatorial Era, perhaps from 50 BC & on. Thus many types would probably be Imperatorial denarii and not earlier Roman Republican types.

I've a decent # of high end Imperatorial denarii (well maybe 4) in high grades. I can have them analyzed by XRF to get the trace compositions. If you have any Phraates didrachmas someone could also analyze these to see if we have any matches.

 

i don't know of any example's of these types...but it seems plausible..it'd be kool to see one... i do have a coin from Levon IV that was tribute paid to and overstruck in Arabic by the Mamluk overlords circa 1337-39 AD. such stamped and overstruck coins do exist.

 

I keep hearing about some reference to Marc Antony and Cleopatra tetradrachms being overstruck by the Parthians but I have never seen one. So I cannot vouch for the authenticity of the information nor give any information on the scale of that activity. It is possible that Antony was using tetradrachms to pay his troops rather than denarii as that was the denomination most used in that region and that much of his army would be used to being paid with such coins.

 

There seems to be too many legionary denarii made of poor quality silver for me to believe this theory. However, I couldn't discount tets being melted down and the silver thinned in order to produce the lower quality denarii.

 

The denarii you mention, the legionary issues, were issued a few years after the failed expedition by Mark Antony to Parthia. Those denarii, heavily debased, were issued by Mark Antony to finance the final showdown with Octavian. The denarii issued by Mark Antony, ca. 40 BC, for use in his eastern campaign, if they were denarii, would have been close to pure silver, similar to the Parthian drachmas of the period, and pretty close in weight and fineness to the Parthian drachma and thus easy to counterstamp and put into circulation in Parthia. It is not a question of coins being made into Roman denarii but one of Parthian coins being made from the captured Roman pay chests. However, Mr. Cheeseman in his response above, may be on to something about the Roman coins in the captured pay chests being tetradrachmas, perhaps those of Syria or Egypt (Cleopatra). Roman troops on expeditions to the east were often paid in local currency like Syrian (Antioch), or in this case Ptolemaic tetradrachmas, which were somewhat debased. I have seen Parthian tetradrachmas of this period and they seem to be also somewhat debased. The author of the book I read never used the terms denarius and drachma. That was my presumption but perhaps what the author was alluding to were Roman pay chests with Eastern debased tetradrachmas which could be counter stamped or restruck as Parthian tetradrachmas. I wish the author would have footnoted where this information, about the captured Roman coins being converted in some way for Parthian use came from but the author does not seem to be a numismatist and the remark seems to be tangential to the narrative.

 

I don't think modern scholarship agrees with this. Scholars doing experiments find it easy to strike coins cold and the advantages are obvious. Here are some a̶n̶c̶i̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶R̶o̶m̶a̶n̶s̶ modern numismatists striking coins.



The one with the sledgehammer is Francois de Callatay, one of the most prolific modern scholars.

 

Thanks very much! You appear to be correct. I googled the subject and found an article by Calgary Coin discussing the metallurgy in more detail.

There seems to be a supply of older articles also stating that ancient coins were struck hot. I think it should be possible to look at the metal grain sizes with an electron microscope and determine definitively.

Nonetheless I'll use this thesis, that ancient coins were struck cold as it seems that the evidence points towards it. In less than a month I'll be giving a talk on Ancient History as Shown by Coins to 10 6th grade classes and I have a slide on how they were made but I'll include the new findings.

Your avatar, however, was not struck cold but made from hot (molten) bronze.

 

True. It was cast. The vast majority of official ancient coins were not cast, so they form an exception.

 

The scenario is entirely possible. One would have to do some research to see if the story is corroborated somewhere. Overstruck coins are certainly not unusual. A simple web search found this example:

https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=720509

 

Thanks for that example. Notice how close the weight the Parthian drachma is to a denarius of that period.

 

This brings up a subject of interest to me. Parthian fourrees are not at all common. I have seen two. Both, including my Mithradates I, were on spread flans which I believe might indicate the coin being overstruck with enough force to erase the undertype or, possibly, that the original coin was flattened without dies before it was struck. If Parthian fourrees really were not common but they overstruck some Roman denarii, it is possible that the mint overstriking did not realize that this coin was plated. I would like to see other Parthian fourrees or any studies on the matter.

 

I doubt Roman coins were struck hot. To make any difference in the malleability of silver, it almost has to be red hot, and the time to move the coin from the furnace to the dies would have resulted in the metal cooling to the point that it would have made no difference.

Barry Murphy.

 

As you say, Doug, they are not common - but they do exist, of course. I own an ex-Sellwood tet that was listed by Baldwins (and thus presumably cataloged earlier by Sellwood himself) as a possible fourrée - based on its weight. I've seen plenty of Parthian overstrikes with visible traces of undertypes - but when those undertypes were identifiable at all, they were earlier Parthian issues.

Here are some links to examples of Parthian drachm fourrées. Whether any of these were struck on Roman denarii fourrées is unclear:

http://www.parthia.com/coins/pdc_5798.jpg
http://www.forumancientcoins.com/gallery/displayimage.php?pos=-118250
http://www.forumancientcoins.com/gallery/displayimage.php?pos=-133667
http://www.forumancientcoins.com/gallery/displayimage.php?pos=-121454
http://www.forumancientcoins.com/gallery/displayimage.php?pos=-119013
http://www.forumancientcoins.com/gallery/displayimage.php?pos=-118529
https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=3326100
https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=3315783
https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=5076748
https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=5076750
https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=4636021
https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=3978205

 

Thanks for that listing. None strike me as strong candidates for overstrikes so I guess Parthia suffered from counterfeiters as well.