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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;red_spork, post: 2199815, member: 74282&quot;]The exact reasons behind the serrations are many. As you said, one theory is that they were to protect against fourees but as you said, a forger could fake serrated denarii as well. Another theory I have read of, in line with the first, is that these denarii were generally used to pay foreigners(i.e. Foreign soldiers) who had no experience with denarii and these serrations served to bolster their confidence in the Roman denarii by attempting to prove there was no fouree core. Michael Crawford, the Roman Republican historian and numismatist who wrote what is now the standard text on Republican issues, theorizes that these had nothing to do with fourees or counterfeiting at all but were simply done for stylistic reasons, arguing that because there is evidence that these were being minted in the same places by the same mint workers as non serrated issues and were circulating at the same time and places as non serrated issues that there likely was no functional purpose of the serrations, simply aesthetics. I have even heard one person argue that they were a sort of nod to the Seleucid serrated bronzes, but I see no evidence for that as the processes for making the serrations were different.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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