Most of us ancients coin collectors are familiar with the silver coinage of Cappadocia from the mint of Caesarea, which has given us some very interesting alternative images of Roman emperors. The silver coins of this mint are usually described and cataloged today as "drachmas" or multiples or fractions of that denomination. About two weeks ago a poster put up a thread in which he cited something from the venerable Stevenson, Dictionary of Roman Coinage, concerning a coin with the ARMENIAC reverse. On that page, (p.81)just above the paragraph reproduced, but not cited, Stevenson cites a silver coin of Caesarea, the one with the ARMENIAC reverse, but calls it a quinarius. In more recent coin books this small Nero coin is universally denominated as a hemi-drachma, and so too, all silver coinage from Caesarea, whether employing Latin or Greek legends, as some variation of the drachma. Stevenson, page 676, discusses the quinarius at some length, with emphasis on the VICTORIA reverse as almost a sine qua non for a coin being a quinarius. Now, as it turns out, the quinarii of the First Century AD are pretty much the same as the hemi drachmas out of Caesarea and employ a VICTORIA reverse as the quinarii out of western mints.. Now I don't want to get into an argument over what we ought to call these Caesarean coins today, but Stevenson was an extraordinary numismatist of ancient coinage and if he refers to these coins as quinarii it may be that the ancients did as well. My question is what was the term used by the ancients for these coins? Where the weight and fineness were close to the coinage out of Rome or Lugdunum, were they called hemi-drachmas in the Greek East and quinarii in the Latin West or was one term used to describe them no matter where they were circulating? I have often wondered what the name used on the street by the average Ronan was for their coinage. Merchants and bankers had to be be careful and precise about the names of the coinage in their ledgers but in the marketplace and taverns, was there a different term for these coins? Consider what we sometimes do. At the hardware store the price is twenty "bucks" but at the bank it's twenty "dollars". So I guess I really have two questions here. Was Stevenson inaccurate in calling the hemi-drachma of Caesarea a quinarius, or did the ancients do that, too? And secondly did the Romans use the same terms we do in today's coin books, in common parlance anyway, when using them in the marketplace? Here are three silver coins of Caesarea. The first is drachma of Tiberius with his son Drusus, second, the hemi-drachma (or quinarius) of Nero with the ARMENIAC reverse and the larger and heavier di-drachma of Vespasian.
