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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Suarez, post: 4353917, member: 99239&quot;]I&#039;ve to admit it&#039;s the first time I&#039;ve seen a coin with one of the figures filed off. That&#039;s a pretty potent argument against my position; at least as exercised in the realm of provincials. Cases of defaced imperial coins on the other hand don&#039;t really mean much other than someone having been bored a long, long time ago. </p><p><br /></p><p>It&#039;s one thing for the incoming emperor to order the tearing down of a statue, the removal of prominent inscriptions and maybe even the desecration of remains from a former ruler. In many cases no such order needed to be proclaimed. The public would have been plenty happy to do this anyway. However, putting out an APB for all citizens to look through their change and turn in coins with the head of so-and-so is unlikely in the extreme given the likely costs associated with such a program. Simply asking them to damage their own coins to the point they may no longer be acceptable in trade is downright laughable. </p><p><br /></p><p>As for providing a reason to explain the many dies for P. Niger, I can&#039;t. But pinning the blame on a supposedly upset Septimius Severus is to reach for the least plausible option first. His is a bit of a unique story. Up until this point we had not had a usurper from the east minting his own coins and it seems to me the difficulties of kickstarting this enterprise would be the likelier reason. Maybe they just went through a ton of dies because they didn&#039;t know how to make steel so their crappy soft metal dies wore out very fast. Maybe after hostilities ceased the majority of these denarii were melted and repurposed since the silver coin from Rome was not commonly used by merchants in these regions. Who knows. </p><p><br /></p><p>What I do know is that people the world over - and throughout time - behave similarly. You don&#039;t give up your money or break it because someone else has a beef with the face on it. That&#039;s their problem. You could, theoretically, demonetize it or effectively place a ransom on it to induce their present owners to turn it in for a profit but, again, this would have been enormously expensive and time consuming. Speaking of which, note that Caracalla, probably the most notoriously fanatical in his quest to erase all traces of a rival, and who had at the same time had ample time and capital to carry out his mission, fails to make a noticeable dent in the extant ratio between coins of his and those of Geta as caesar. If memory serves, year for year from 200-210, the date range that would have been heavily circulating throughout the empire, there&#039;s a close to 50-50% relationship between the two. If this is correct it&#039;s solid proof that he was unwilling or unable to delete Geta&#039;s face from the public.</p><p><br /></p><p>Rasiel[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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