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<p>[QUOTE="dougsmit, post: 8160897, member: 19463"]I place much less importance in the matter than most people. To me, nummus means 'coin' and nothing more. It does seem odd that it was used by Pliny since his day had multiple denominations but much of the time in later periods there was just one common coin so people would know what you meant. Yes, there were other coins like gold, for example, but people probably could communicate values in context without spelling out details any more than if I were to ask you what you paid for your car and you answered '23'. After the middle of the third century it seems that most attempts to have parallel denominations did not last long and different people from different classes might rarely have occasion to need to know how many coppers you had to give for a gold. 'Scholars' don't like to admit that they don't have all the answers or that the answer they have don't apply in every time and place. From that we get invented names like antoninianus or expect the word coin to have meant the same thing to Pliny that it did to Constantine. In the later period, I doubt people saw old coins very often. I am curious what you did if you had no current coin but had a bunch of old ones that had been called in years before. I am unaware of any explanations of this in primary sources and guesses made on assumptions are not solid facts. To me, it is an interesting question but not one with a clean cut answer.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>
[QUOTE="dougsmit, post: 8160897, member: 19463"]I place much less importance in the matter than most people. To me, nummus means 'coin' and nothing more. It does seem odd that it was used by Pliny since his day had multiple denominations but much of the time in later periods there was just one common coin so people would know what you meant. Yes, there were other coins like gold, for example, but people probably could communicate values in context without spelling out details any more than if I were to ask you what you paid for your car and you answered '23'. After the middle of the third century it seems that most attempts to have parallel denominations did not last long and different people from different classes might rarely have occasion to need to know how many coppers you had to give for a gold. 'Scholars' don't like to admit that they don't have all the answers or that the answer they have don't apply in every time and place. From that we get invented names like antoninianus or expect the word coin to have meant the same thing to Pliny that it did to Constantine. In the later period, I doubt people saw old coins very often. I am curious what you did if you had no current coin but had a bunch of old ones that had been called in years before. I am unaware of any explanations of this in primary sources and guesses made on assumptions are not solid facts. To me, it is an interesting question but not one with a clean cut answer.[/QUOTE]
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