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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 2969338, member: 19463&quot;]I see no reason to doubt them based on the images.&nbsp; I think you may fail to appreciate just how bad things can be when people don&#039;t care.&nbsp;&nbsp; Many/most coins of the period were not produced on carefully weighed out flans.&nbsp; The makers did not have accurate electronic scales we buy for $10 and lacked the time to adjust individual flans.&nbsp; They were provided with a weight of metal and told to make a certain number of coins from it.&nbsp; It mattered little if some coins were heavy and some were light as long as each pound of metal produced the right number of coins.&nbsp; I suspect the guys who poured out the metal would develop a feel for how to do it with reasonable accuracy but one useful skill might be to sense when you had been pouring too heavy or light on the first half so you could correct it and come out OK in the end.&nbsp; I might compare this to making a dozen cornbread muffins by pouring batter into twelve muffin tin cups.&nbsp; Some bakers are better at it than others.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>I always wondered how many Romans on the street paid any attention to the size of the coins they encountered in trade.&nbsp; Did they save back the nice, heavy ones and pay the utilities with the junkers?&nbsp; How many looked at a coin and commented on their fond memories of the Antoninus Pius days when a denarius was a denarius before that cad Commodus started making trash.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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