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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 3541691, member: 19463&quot;]One other point:&nbsp; I don&#039;t believe the average man on the street and certainly the average soldier looked at the money in the same way as those modern students who assay coins.&nbsp; Whose coins &#039;looked&#039; vauuable?&nbsp; Whether tricks like surface enrichment were in use or not, the coins of the Severans as a whole looked like silver and conveyed as good a &#039;denarius&#039; feel as did the late Commodus and Didius Julianus coins.&nbsp; Certainly there were some that knew the coins were missing some silver but what made more difference to most would have been the buying power.&nbsp; I doubt many people had a lot of experience with Marcus era coins by that time.&nbsp; Today, you have to be retirement age to have much experience with silver coinage made of silver.&nbsp; Marcus Aurelius died in 180; I was graduated from high school in 1964.&nbsp; 2019-1964=55&nbsp; 180+55=235 235 AD was the year the Severans ended.&nbsp; How many 73 year old men do you think were walking around discussing the state of the silver coinage?&nbsp; I suspect more attention was paid to whether or not bread was available at the usual price.&nbsp; I do wonder how the public received the switch over to the antoninianus.&nbsp; We are not aware of how people felt about the money in their purses.&nbsp; We should be careful not to read modern &#039;Bryan Dollar&#039; attitudes (or 5th century BC either, for that matter) into the minds of the man on the Roman street.&nbsp; I do know that any people who had question about the value of Septimius Severus&#039; coinage were well advised to keep it to themselves.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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