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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;red_spork, post: 7953715, member: 74282&quot;]So, for some background, the &quot;traditional&quot; view, at least that in Crawford, is that the quadrigati ended circa 215 BC and the first denarii and victoriati began being minted circa 211 BC, with the first victoriati basically a sort of complementary coinage to the denarii which were seen as the main coinage of the Romans. This of course leaves an odd gap between 215 and 211, during which it appears the Romans continued minting bronze but according to this view no silver.</p><p><br /></p><p>A relatively recent paper by Pierluigi Debernardi and Roberto Lippi titled &quot;When quantification makes a difference: a preliminary attempt to arrange early victoriati by extensive die studies&quot; presented the preliminary results of a very large die study undertaken by the authors to estimate numbers of dies and thus, total numbers of coins produced. What they found was that the earliest issues of victoriati were massive: by their estimate, using Warren Esty&#039;s method for estimating total number of dies from a sample, they arrived at an estimate of 5404 dies for the earliest issues of victoriati versus 2289 for the earliest issues of denarii. The authors posit that instead of being complementary, the victoriati were the main coinage of the Romans during these gap years between the last quadrigati and the earliest denarii, and that the victoriati largely ended circa 210 BC as the denarius was really beginning to take hold. I will point out that the authors of this paper were not the first to espouse this point of view but they were the first to really quantify the output and show just how large these issues were, which Crawford had severely underestimated.</p><p><br /></p><p>Personally, I think this is probably the correct view and to me it makes a lot more sense than the very crowded chronology proposed by Crawford. 215-211 were crucial years for the war and I cannot imagine the Romans funded the war with bronzes and existing stocks of quadrigati. The introduction of the heavier denarius of finer silver after the fall of Syracuse and the Roman capture of immense quantities of silver makes sense, but I can&#039;t imagine they were able to stop minting silver for any real period of time.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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