Am a little disappointed to find that Doug and Valentinian fail to defend their apparent position, nor it seems does anyone else have substantive comment to add. Here are 4 reasons for rejecting Doug’s proposal 1) I agree with Mattlingly (1928) that the massive hoarding of Gallic radiates etc in Britain was probably due to an adverse revaluation - probably by Aurelian. Given the choice between one, two or three revaluations over a mere 15 or 20 years, Occam’s razor favours just the one 2) Aurelian perhaps did not have to wait for the later full silver issues of Carausius or Diocletian to appear to fulfil a decimalisation. A least some old full silver denarii obviously already existed from earlier centuries. Its plausible they had been driven out of circulation by Gresham type events but were still held in savings hoards. Actually, a decimalisation may have been set up specifically to try get the old silver coins out of hoards and back into circulation at a respectable value. 3) Doug apparently suggests 15 or 20 years is an unthinkably long period over which to fully roll out a decimalisation. Recall that Queen Victoria produced the 24d florin as the first denomination in a new decimal coinage in 1849. Full decimalisation of the coinage was completed in 1971. Not 20 years but 120 years. Note further that yet 25 more years passed before the old 24d coins were demonetised. 4) Turning now to an alternative pre-modern context, when the Ghorids conquored North India around 1200 AD they found found a situation not unlike that facing Aurelian. The old jital – theoretically c. 3.43g and once struck in quite good silver – had been replaced by all sorts of debased coins in the range 18% down to zero silver. They almost immediately created a completely new denomination, an 11g pure silver tanka, but struck tiny numbers of them in remote Bengal. It took them 25 years to get it together to strike any silver tankas at all at the capital Delhi, and again that was in tiny quantities. It took another 15 years to get it together to launch the silver tanka into mass production. Part of the problem they faced was surely getting a silver stock together at all, when taxes would often be paid in very base metal. A second part would be the practical industrial problem involved in refining probably billions of junky jitals to recover the silver from them. Aurelian and Co would seem to be in a very similar position (as again, Mattingly said long since) Regarding defense of the suggestion I made, well, I judge those four points should do for starters Rob T PS Anyone noticed the strange co-incidence that Nero’s denarius at c. 3.41g is ever so close to the standard Hindu unit of c. 3.43g? Romans were aware of it and saw it as evidence of a lost common culture. Personally I think it is probably a coincidence. If it is not - the only plausible way forward with the idea seems to me to predate the Indo-European expansion .
Update: An interesting recent piece here on Aurelian's reform. https://www.academia.edu/5914954/Aurelians_Monetary_Reform_Between_Debasement_and_Public_Trust Rob T
A further new work on late Roman inflationary matters – very interesting, but not written in a very accessible way. https://www.academia.edu/38465693/The_Constantian_Monetary_Revolution?email_work_card=title I mention a couple of matters that troubled me 1) why call the solidus a “4 gram” coin? Surely the preferred theoretical is c. 4.54g, with c. 4.45 generally achieved? 2) what do the numbers an the axes on the two graphs near the start stand for? Are they saying by 360 AD a pound of gold was worth almost 10 billion denarii? If not - then what? Those of us who read Buttrey’s sarcastic dismissal of the work of Bolin back in the 1960’s must be struck by how far ideas have now moved….. Rob T
Further to my last - I tracked down the source of Bransbourg’s graph to this (on line) paper by Carla (see page 29+) https://www.academia.edu/196592/Loro_nella_tarda_antichità_aspetti_economici_e_sociali Actually Carla – having complained about the misuse of terms by numismatists, goes on to be rather vague himself as to the terms he is applying. However – if we look at his table on page 27 he gives a starter value of “gold” as “50,000”. That seems broadly in an acceptable general ballpark for a (Roman) pound of gold in notional or “ghost” denarii around the time of Aurelian. Reading subsequent prices from the table, by around 360 AD a pound of gold has apparently risen to just short of one billion “ghost” denarii. So that does make some sort of sense. Exactly why Carla then writes just short of 10 billion for 360 AD when he transposes his figures to his graph however still puzzles me. Again – can anyone assist? Rob T
