Ancient Faces and Politics on coins

mrbrklyn · Aug 26, 2012

http://www.dubaichronicle.com/2012/08/26/gold-coins-money/

So when Vespasian was proclaimed Emperor by the legions in Egypt in AD 69, he hurried to strike silver and gold coins at Antioch, Tacitus tells us.

Two hundred years later, the “insane despot” Commodus would only believe that his friend Perennius was plotting to overthrow him when he was shown coins already bearing his former favorite’s image. And ancient Persian kings went further, says the later Armenian chronicler Moses of Chorene, each seeing to it that “all the money in the royal treasury was recoined with his effigy” as soon as he took power.

The face on a coin mattered, in short, and mattered a lot. Not least because, as head of state, the king or caesar was also head of the army. And with armies needing to be paid if you wanted to keep them on side, coins were the most common currency – a sort of “state gazette”, in the words of a much later English writer – for spreading political news to pre-literate peoples.
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