Septimius Severus' Debasement

Discussion in 'Ancient Coins' started by jorglueke, May 3, 2019.

  1. EWC3

    EWC3 (mood: stubborn)

    Fascinating thread. I dug into the sources a little, (Cassius Dio and Herodianus) and as far as I could see nothing was said about the debasement there. Did I overlook anything? On the question - “Did the legionaries find out” it seems to me we are factually completely in the dark. My own guess is that such news would spread rapidly, in gossip, about how SS was raising all this new cash – mostly because, like Ksorbo, I think the citizens of ancient Rome were much like us, and for them too, this was an important fact that they would be keen to know about.

    On your second point, “what did they think about it?” we are on firmer ground. If the sources say nothing, it seems most likely most people did not care much – much as Ksorb says here:

    Brings to mind a separate incident. As a sort of book end to the first. SS was in favour of a reducing the intrinsic value of cash in c. 200 AD, and the decision ultimately unravelled badly. There was a debate in England c. 1690 concerning whether to reducing the intrinsic value of cash which went the other way, the intrinsic value being rigidly maintained, (and arguably that decision unravelled badly too!). But during that English debate, a leading pro-reduction guy, Barbon, made the statement “Not one man in a thousand can tell you how many grains there are in a crown”. Maybe he was exaggerating, but still, its an interesting insight into what some would call economic complacency, that is perhaps a permanent part of the equation.

    Its interesting to ponder what Mattingly wrote about Septimus & Co. (in 1928, but still defended in 1962). “the Government….did not sufficiently realise that it was only attempting to raise by an inadequate form of indirect taxation what it could not trust itself to raise by direct (Roman Coins p. 185)

    Rob T
     
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  3. dougsmit

    dougsmit Member

    I maintain that the pinning of blame on Septimius overlooks what happened to the denarius in the final years of Commodus (or is it just the ones in my collection???) and is caused by meaningless statistics where all coins of one reign are taken as a group. Debasement did not start in 200 but back in the time of Nero.
    One effect of the way this was done (silver removed from dimes and quarters all at once but halves taking the 40% intermediate step) was the destruction of the half dollar as a circulating coin. When I was a kid, halves were a main coin of commerce. People did not use 2 quarters as done today. Most kids today have never seen a half and teen clerks at Taco Bell don't know what to do with one since there is no place for them in the register. Some blame the death of the half on it having JFK's picture on it (and that argument has some strength) but I wonder if the half would still be in use had the 40% step not been taken.
     
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  4. Magnus Maximus

    Magnus Maximus Dulce et Decorum est....

    That’s most likely due to the Cyprian plague that occurred early into Decius’s reign which coincides with the silver purity decrease early on in Decius’s reign
    The plague was bad, like really bad: Possibly killing a quarter of the legions and a large amount of the population( the tax base). With a reduced tax base the government probably opened the flood gates for increasingly debased antoninianii.
    See
    https://www.academia.edu/3784962/A_...peared_and_the_debasement_of_the_antoninianus
    And
    3FE0134F-632F-4F60-B20C-7B21E8051D20.png
     
    Last edited: Jun 5, 2019
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  5. EWC3

    EWC3 (mood: stubborn)

    Looks like this thread ran out of steam, but its a convenient place to maybe broaden out the discussion a little, with regard to this and other threads?

    In 1928 Mattingly saw all the Roman Imperial silver debasements, from Nero onwards, as a series of linked failures of Governmental tax policies, culminating in a kind of state bankruptcy under Gallienus – a “disastrous crash”…... “evil” ….for….. “the hard working citizen”.

    He went on to explain the huge hoards of base ants we find as being a consequence of that matter – (pointing to Aurelian’s refusal to accept old coin at parity) :

    “Many owners, sooner than part with their money at unfavourable rates, hoarded it in the ground” (Roman Coins, p. 186).

    Personally, I suspect Mattingly was in the right ballpark.

    Since about 2000, archaeologists have been stepping into the driving seat of numismatic interpretation, and, it seems to me, have been getting it increasingly wrong. It became fashionable first to argue that the huge hoards were “worthless”. (Surely false, even if treated as copper?). Later, at the BM, driven by Moorhead, backed by Bland, that the hoarding activity was “ritual”.

    for criticism of that see the thread:

    https://www.cointalk.com/threads/where-frome.322173/

    At a meet about 7 years back time, it was announced that the BM/PAS people had won a 600K grant to look into later 3rd century British hoarding. Does anyone know how that research is progressing? A quick web search did not throw up any results at all....................

    However, at that same meet, Nick Mayhew announced that a kind of rival research program was being launched under Howgego, at Oxford, looking at all Roman hoarding activity Empire wide. Interestingly that was privately funded by a coin collector. That work seems to be still chugging forward.

    http://chre.ashmus.ox.ac.uk/

    (funded by Baron Lorne Thyssen-Bornemisza via the Augustus Foundation)

    Seems a lot of work is being done via Oxford in collecting data. And elsewhere Howgego seemed to take sensible stances on coin interpretation. However, in a quick search, I can only find little interpretative work stemming from the Oxford project, and nothing to counter the misguided fashion, as I would see it, of pointing to imagined ancient “rituals”.

    Anyone know more than I on these developments?

    Rob T
     
    Last edited: Jun 6, 2019
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  6. EWC3

    EWC3 (mood: stubborn)

    Got an interesting reply to my questions above from the horse's mouth - Prof Howgego. See below - something to look forward to I think

    Rob T

    Prof H writes:

    The Coin Hoards of the Roman Empire Project will be producing a book of a conference entitled Coin Hoards and Hoarding in the Roman World, which will be the first major interpretative output. This is currently with OUP.

    The BM/Leicester project is also currently producing a book. For the project see:

    https://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/a...ojects/hoarding-in-iron-age-and-roman-britain
     
  7. jorglueke

    jorglueke Member

    It's a fair point to question the completeness of the data. I'd think there'd be enough poor specimens around where someone could fund a decent expansion of our knowledge in this area.

    So you're saying if they had debased the halves right away in 1965 people would've just kept using them and we might still be doing sop today.?
     
  8. jorglueke

    jorglueke Member

    That's good news

     
  9. jorglueke

    jorglueke Member

    My assumption has been that Diocletian demonetized the old currency when he started issuing the argentii and that is why we have so money pristine examples of Probus and other late antoninnani. So I concur with Mattingly, people probably just buried what they had since they weren't going to get a good deal at the exchange table.

     
  10. EWC3

    EWC3 (mood: stubborn)

    When I wrote to challenged Moorhead my own thoughts went to Diocletian rather than Aurelian. But I have a slender knowledge of Roman affairs, so that does not count for much.

    However, I seem to recall Lee Toone agreed with me in general terms - against Bland and Co - on this matter back then. He knows the period way better than I.

    I think there are a lot of people who agree on the "they weren't going to get a good deal at the exchange table” interpretation, truth be told. Maybe even Prof H?

    Rob T
     
  11. jorglueke

    jorglueke Member

    Generally speaking even Valerian's coins looked like coins. After his demise the coins of Gallienus and Claudius were garbage. Aurelian clearly made the coins look like coins again. He dealt with a revolt of mint workers (or an armed gang funded by a skimming mint master), and he shut down and moved the Milan mint. It is plausible to me that Aurelian at least wanted to maintain a standard or 4-5% silver. Probus likely continued this. Carus, Carinus, and Numerian seemed to have let the standard slip again. When Diocletian reforms the coinage he probably came up with a straight x# antoninianni = 1 argentus. If the Aurelian and Probus pieces had a standard of even 4-5% good silver and their immediate successors and predecessors had lower quality coinage then finding hoards of nearly pristine pieces of Probus and Aurelian makes a lot of sense. Just like people would pick out 90% silver coins from change after 1965.
     
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