Coins as History

My name is Kevin Butcher.

And I'm a professor at the University

of Warwick in the Department of Classics and Ancient History.

And I'll be talking about coins as history,

and specifically about the coinage of Augustus.

Now we'll start with coins as history.

We want to know, what do coins actually

tell us about the past?

And more importantly, can we actually trust their evidence?

A key thing to remember about coins

is that they are usually issued by governments.

So they're quite an important insight

into the ways in which the governments were

thinking about disseminating messages on their coins.

Coins spread very far and wide throughout the Roman world,

and so they were extremely useful to the governments.

They could put designs on them which

would provide political messages to their followers

or perhaps even persuade others.

Now there are two sides to any coin,

and we'll have a look at some of the aspects of these two

sides of the coin.

The front of the coin we call the obverse.

The obverse usually carries the portrait

of the ruler in Roman imperial times,

so we tend to refer to it as the head side of the coin.

So I've got an example.

Here, for example, is a coin of the Emperor Claudius.

Now we might wonder, is this portrait actually accurate?

Now it's an interesting question to pose.

Are the portraits on Roman coins accurate?

And the answer to that is, that really depends

on the character of the ruler.

The portraits are really, in many ways, quite personal.

If we look at the first living Roman

to put his head on the coins, Julius Caesar,

we see a portrait of a middle aged man who

has a balding forehead, and it looks

as if he's trying to hide this behind a large crown,

a big wreath that he's got on his head.

And we might assume that this is reasonably accurate portrait.

When we come to the portraits of Augustus, however,

we find that Augustus practically never ages.

So although he becomes an old man over time,

the portraits on his coins still show him as a young man.

In that sense, we could say that it's not

an accurate photographic representation of the emperor.

If we look at the portraits of Nero,

Nero appears as quite a fat young man on his coins.

He has a double chin, and he has a big, thick neck.

And we might think this is not a particularly

flattering portrait of him, and therefore, we might say,

well, this is obviously an accurate portrait because it's

not a very attractive one.

But perhaps from Nero's perspective,

it was a kind of flattering portrait,

because certainly in the Hellenistic world,

images of plump rulers, or fat rulers,

were considered to show that the--

if the ruler was plump, then his kingdom was prosperous.

And so that may have been the message

that Nero was trying to get across on his coins,

that Nero is plump and the Roman Empire

is enjoying great prosperity.

And Nero is obviously influenced by Greek influences,

and so we might expect him to be kind of plugged

into that but that manner of thinking.

On the other hand, his successor, the emperor Galba,

who was one of the emperors of the year of four emperors,

in AD 69, appears as an old man.

He's balding, he looks really like a kind of no-nonsense,

austere general.

And he was obviously trying to convey that message,

and perhaps his old age and his general

what we might call ugliness is actually

emphasized on his coins to show that he is harking back

to the virtuous days of old Rome.

So the portraits on the coins vary,

depending to some extent on the characters of the emperors.

Another thing that can affect their accuracy

is the fact that you often find that when a new emperor comes

to power, his portrait tends to look

a little bit like the portraits of the previous emperor.

This is because the artists who were engraving the dies

were used to doing portraits of the old emperor

and it took them a little while to become

accustomed to doing a new and unique portrait

of the new emperor.

Nevertheless, we can say that in the early Roman Empire,

the portraits of the rulers are generally easy to identify.

We can always identify Nero on a coin

or the emperor Antoninus Pius or the emperor Augustus.

The portraits are all quite unique.

So it was important to make them look distinct,

even if the portraits weren't an accurate portrayal of how

they looked at the time.

And these portraits are also very important to us

for identifying portraits of rulers in other media.

So because on the coins we have the profile

of the emperor with an inscription telling us

who it is, we can then use those profiles

to identify, for example, portrait busts or heads

on statues, which of course don't carry inscriptions.

And so often we're not certain who they are.

And it's only by comparison with the coins

that we can identify some of these rulers.

So that's one side of the coin.

The other side we call the reverse.

These often carry messages or designs

that are somehow of interest or pertinent to the ruler.

There's a whole very wide vocabulary of designs and types

that are used on coins.

Quite often what we see are figures

that we call personifications.

And what these are are usually female figures,

and they represent some quality or character

of the emperor-- so clemency, or piety, or manly virtue,

things like that.

And because most of these nouns in Latin are feminine nouns,

they appear as female figures.

Now it might seem rather strange, for example,

that manly virtue is a feminine noun,

and therefore appears as a female figure,

but that's the way it is.

So we have a whole series of female figures

that appear on the coins representing some aspect

of the emperor's qualities.

But we also find all kinds of other designs as well.

Some of them we might say are historical.

The Romans probably didn't think of them in those terms,

but once again, they were something that

was important to the ruler.

Perhaps one of the most famous of these

is a denarius issued by Brutus, one of Caesar's assassins.

This coin shows the portrait of Brutus

on one side, which is slightly ironic,

since Caesar putting his head on coins

was considered to be one of the aspects of kingship

that they didn't like, and now we

see Brutus putting his own head on the coins rather

like a king.

So you have the head on the obverse, the front.

And then when you turn it over, on the other side

you have a cap of liberty between two daggers.

And there's an abbreviated inscription underneath.

And this says, "For the Ides of March."

So it's a very vivid example of a coin

that reflects Roman history.

However, sometimes the coins actually

provide us with information about aspects of history

that we didn't know anything about.

So for example, we sometimes find

coins of emperors that have completely disappeared

from the historical record.

A case in point is a ruler called Silbannacus.

He's known from only two coins that have survived.

And we think that he was a usurper at Rome, maybe

only ruled for a few days, in AD 253.

These are the kinds of things we can sometimes

gain from Roman coins that allow us to reconstruct aspects

of Roman history.

But there are other things that appear on coins--

monuments, for example, Nero opening

the great circular harbor at Ostia.

The circular harbor appears on the coins.

However, some people would sometimes

question the veracity of the evidence.

Are the coins sometimes telling us lies?

Is everything on the coins really true?

And we have here an example of a coin

that seems to be telling a lie.

This is a coin that was issued during the year of the four

emperors, AD 69.

It's a silver denarius.

On one side, it has clasped hands

and it reads, [LATIN],, the fidelity of the army.

And on the other side, it shows one of these personification,

Concordia--

agreement or concord-- and it says, [LATIN],, the concord

or the agreement of the Praetorians.

Now it's fairly certain that this coin

was issued under the emperor Vitellius, who at the time

didn't actually control Italy, and therefore

had no control over the Praetorians, who

were under the control of his rival, the emperor Otho.

So why is this coin saying that it has the agreement

of the Praetorians on it?

It seems to be telling a lie.

However, we could see this as a way of Vitellius

trying to legitimize his rule.

This is another important aspect of the images on the coins,

is that they tend to be aspects of legitimacy.

And so what we're seeing here is a message

that's saying that any ruler who has legitimacy

will have the agreement of the Praetorian.

So in that sense, it isn't really a lie,

it's more like wishful thinking.

This is what they would like to have.

And we sometimes see this on other coins as well.

So for example, Vitellius's rival, the emperor Otho,

has a coin that says [LATIN],, peace

over the globe of the world.

This is a time when civil war was looming

and it didn't seem very likely that peace

was going to break out.

But nevertheless, it's an expression of wishful thinking

and the sort of thing that we hope that the emperor will

be able to achieve.

Another important feature of the study of coinage

concerns the finds of coins in archeology.

Roman coins are very, very commonly found on Roman sites.

This is actually an interesting contrast

to say the medieval coins-- medieval coins are much less

common finds than Roman coins are.

So it seems that the Romans were using their coins

in very large quantities.

And they were also losing them in considerable quantity.

So finds of coins can tell us things

like where the coins circulated, where particular sorts of coins

circulated, for how long they circulated,

and perhaps the ways in which people were using them.

There are two sorts of coin find--

two main sorts.

One of them is what we call a hoard.

That is, a group of coins that have been deliberately

collected together and buried--

usually a savings or something like that.

And then there are what we call single finds.

These are often coins of low value that people have lost

or they've dropped while they're conducting transactions

in the marketplace.

So these two sorts of evidence can tell us different things.

The hoards can tell us what kinds of coins people generally

thought were valuable or which ones they thought

were more valuable than other ones.

And the single finds can tell us something

about the sorts of coins that people were using

for everyday, small exchanges.

Another aspect of the coinage that we can study

is the metallurgy of the coins.

What are they actually made of?

Does the silver content decline over time?

Well, yes, it does.

Is this telling us something about the financial fortunes

of the Roman Empire?