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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Finn235, post: 8058431, member: 98035&quot;]I think the problem was:</p><p><br /></p><p>1) These coins were roughly 300-400 years old by Caesar&#039;s time. Coins did circulate longer back then, but even substantially spread hoards like Reka Devnia (which in all likelihood was probably assembled over several generations) we seldom see coins more than 200 years apart. </p><p><br /></p><p>2) The Attic standard didn&#039;t really survive the collapse of the Seleucid empire. The ~11g Cistophorus survived until the time of Hadrian, and the ~14g Egyptian tet stopped being fine silver under the later Ptolemies, and contained functionally zero silver by the end of the 2nd century. If the coins are not current legal tender, they are bullion, which leads us to</p><p><br /></p><p>3) Between the late Republic and the end of the Crisis, the denarius&#039; buying power was very weakly correlated to its fineness. Prices would of course inflate, but slow enough that the layfolk didn&#039;t always feel it. During the good times, people trust fiat currency because it isn&#039;t restricted by silly things like &quot;not enough silver to make any more&quot;. Thus, if a farmer in former Athens/Macedonian territory found a hoard of silver, it would be in their best interest to try to melt it all down and turn it into denarii, rather than keep it as-is.</p><p><br /></p><p>Which is an interesting point - I wonder how often the good silver &quot;barbarian&quot; denarii were actually made by a Roman citizen/subject from a recovered hoard of Greek coins? IIRC, someone here once posted an imitative denarius that was actually higher purity than the real thing[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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