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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Juan Blanco, post: 1571549, member: 41665&quot;]medoraman-</p><p>If I am reading the right &#039;intrinsic rates,&#039; I don&#039;t think Domitian debased the coinage much at the end of his reign (-4.6%) ; on the contrary, it appears he <i>improved </i>the denarius purity from his predecessor.</p><p><br /></p><p>Here&#039;s another excellent source on the Denarius debasement (p.230):</p><p><a href="http://historiantigua.cl/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/MoneyandGovernmentintheRomanEmpire.pdf" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://historiantigua.cl/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/MoneyandGovernmentintheRomanEmpire.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://historiantigua.cl/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/MoneyandGovernmentintheRomanEmpire.pdf</a></p><p><br /></p><p>Domitian AD 81/2: 91.5% Fine</p><p>Domitian AD 82/5: 97.9% Fine</p><p>Domitian AD 85-96: 93.5% Fine</p><p><br /></p><p>More generally, I&#039;m not sure it&#039;s<i> either/or </i>(weather OR currency debasement) - I suppose commodity price inflation might be driven more by polices (wages, maybe even taxes?) <u>coincident</u> with a famine lasting several years for this Wheat Price Event in AD 93.&nbsp;&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>It&#039;s certainly NOWHERE REMOTELY CLOSE to the very localized AD 70 Wheat Price Event (siege of Jerusalem) described by Josephus Flavius ... and maybe that&#039;s what got conflated in the &#039;sack of Gold/plate of food&#039; adage.</p><p><br /></p><p>But Domitian&#039;s cereal policy (response to scarcity) would seem less localized to Antioch in Pisidia if the Emperor&#039;s concern for Food were more explicitly advertised on coinage <i>throughout the Empire</i>. As an early Price-Shock (about 14 years before Trajan&#039;s debasement) and the &quot;linear decline&quot; thereafter reported by Duncan-Jones, might it be a cyclical signal?[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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