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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Victor_Clark, post: 2562529, member: 10613&quot;]Ken, trying to view the past in modern context is an often repeated mistake that does not apply to this situation at all. These fractionals were almost certainly minted as payment for the military and the Roman soldier was definitely not paid a great deal. So the majority of transactions that the government made would have been fairly small. These small payments were not just limited to the military, part of the fiscal obligations meant paying all government employees and workers. For example, the rebuilding of Constantinople by Constantine necessitated minting a lot of coins to pay the workers, which probably numbered in the thousands. Entirely new types were struck in Constantinople and these coins would have surely been paid out, in small amounts, to these people.</p><p><br /></p><p>An example of the minting of coins for government interests is demonstrated by the location of mints. Note that in the 4th century the diocese of Hispania did not even have a mint. Using your argument, one might assume that people in Spain did not use coins, but from hoards and single coin finds, we know different. So no mints in Spain because there were no big government expenses in the area- like building new cities or paying lots of troops and coins would have slowly filtered in or been introduced through occasional payments for large orders of items like crops or cattle or whatever locals could produce for the government.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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