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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 7622819, member: 19463&quot;]The late Roman debasement of the coinage was just one way of handling the fact faced by Rome then and our modern times today.&nbsp; The value of silver and other precious metals had increased to a point that it was impractical to use in coins for the daily use. The US, in 1964, took the other path by removing the silver from their 10 cent coin and making it out of a copper/nickel alloy that they figured people would accept as silver because it was silvery looking on the outside and, most importantly would be accepted in vending machines that used electric conductivity to reject fake coins.&nbsp; This did result in a strange situation where the five cent coin, made of a different alloy of the same metals was worth more in melt value than the ten cent coin but that did not bother the average coin user.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>The Romans between Gallienus and Aurelian discovered that some people cared how much actual silver was in the coins and some did not but the staff of the mints cared enough to be skimming silver and making coins worth less than advertised.&nbsp; Did Claudius II know his coins were less than the value of the previous ones or was he a victim of the crop of mintworkers that Aurelian eliminated in the Felicissimus revolt?&nbsp; I don&#039;t know.&nbsp; The &#039;experts&#039; that know everything about ancient history don&#039;t either.&nbsp; Which is better?&nbsp; On one hand we say silver is worth so much that using it in a coin that will buy everyday things would make coins the size of those ancient Greek things that were easily lost <b>OR</b> to say your coinage has the amount of silver required by the purchasing power even though that assumes guys like Felicissimus are honest, hard working bureaucrats.&nbsp; The third choice, currently in fashion, is to tell people that money is based on trust in the system and the government so it makes no difference whatsoever whether the &#039;silver&#039; coinage has any silver in it at all.&nbsp; After all, you people are trusting in the value of paper money, bank accounts or crypto-currency anyway so why sweat the small stuff?&nbsp; Claudius was an amateur or thought he had bigger things to worry about.&nbsp; Aurelian made a decision and straightened out things at the mint well enough that it was another generation before inflation required another coinage &#039;reform&#039;.&nbsp; He could have told the Roman people that they had to accept any coin he issued and promoted Felicissimus to be Caesar for being so modern thinking that he saved wasting all that silver on the common people some of whom would not know the difference.&nbsp; Today, we who collect are amazed at the number of modern people who can not tell gold from brass and silver from pot metal.&nbsp; How is it that we modern folks can look down of the Romans who thought a coin worth a set amount needed to contain that amount of precious metal even if that amount was a speck?&nbsp; If we assume a silver dime is now $3 in value (roughly speaking) a spendable for 10 cent coin should be 1/30th of that.&nbsp; If we take the 2.27 gram 1964 dime weight and divide by 30, we get 0.07g which would be about the same as the smallest Greek fractional silver coins.&nbsp; I know few of you use dimes for purchases so lets talk about quarters.&nbsp; Below is a small coin in that general range.&nbsp; Would you like to use it at Aldi&#039;s grocery store to set free a shopping cart?&nbsp; What is it I can actually buy for a quarter?&nbsp; I forget.&nbsp; </p><p><img src="http://www.forumancientcoins.com/dougsmith/0phocentcomb.jpg" class="bbCodeImage wysiwygImage" alt="" unselectable="on" />[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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