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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;kevin McGonigal, post: 8215205, member: 72790&quot;]I used to think this too, but I have more recently concluded that over the centuries the inhabitants of the Empire in this period had pretty much accepted their silver currency as nothing more than a fiat currency, at least for as long as the Roman&nbsp; state accepted its own coinage as some kind of payment for taxes and merchants were willing to accept it in the market place. In the US, we went from requiring that our currency&nbsp; be redeemable in gold to being redeemable only in silver to it being redeemable to, well , nothing, over a less than fifty year period. In Rome, for as long as a citizen could collect enough of these plated, or silver washed coins for conversion to good aurei I don&#039;t think it mattered to him how ratty the coinage now looked. From literary evidence, or rather the lack of it, the system seemed to work up until&nbsp; the reign of Aurelian whose better coinage (4-5% silver) may have prompted the average Roman to look at the stuff coined before his improved coinage and started folks wondering about its worth and from that observation to start dumping the junk for whatever it would fetch and convincing the business&nbsp; class to demand the better coinage of Aurelian. Either that or a wheelbarrow filled with the ratty stuff. For whatever reasons, before Aurelian&#039;s reforms, the populace seems to have&nbsp; been remarkably quiescent about the decline in their coinage, which may explain the odd phenomenon of there being not that much inflation, or little literary evidence of it till about 274 AD.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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