Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/711

IMPERIAL ROM AX.] NUMISMATICS 653 gave little choice to the coining authority or to the artist, and to the Greek royal coinages, which slipped speedily into .heraldry. The family coins show a delight in recording the achievements of the house, and sometimes are so personal as to rank with modern medals, the spirit of which is even outdone in such a subject as Sulla s dream. With the Greeks the historical sense is latent until the age of the kings, and then does not pass beyond portraiture and at first a scanty symbolical commemoration of events ; with the Romans, even before portraits are introduced, the desire to record events is intensely strong. Thus we have not only such legendary subjects as the rape of the Sabines and Tarpeia crushed beneath the bucklers, which may be classed with the Greek mythi cal types, but also past historical events, as Marcus ^Emilius Lepidus crowning Ptolemy Epiphanes, to whom he was governor, and Paullus ^Emilius raising a trophy, while Perseus, king of Macedon, and his two children stand before him, and also events of the present, as the reverse type of Brutus, the cap of liberty between two daggers with the inscription EID MAR, and on a piece of Sextus Pompey the pharos of Messene above a Roman galley and for reverse Scylla striking with a rudder. The special mythology and superstition of Pome is not less fully illustrated, as well as the coming in of Greek ideas, in such a manner that many types thoroughly Greek alternate with purely Roman ones. The art of the republican coins reflects that of contemporary Greek money, but is never equal to the better style of the late Hellenic issues. Augustus. The history of the imperial coinage is full of metrological diffi culties. These arise from the conditions fixed by Augustus (16-15 B.C.), by which the emperor alone coined gold and silver, the senate alone bronze. Consequently the senate was wholly at the mercy of the emperor. Augustus struck the aureus at 40 to the pound, equal to 25 denarii at 84 to the pound. He introduced a new bronze coinage in two metals, the sestertius of 4 asses and dupondius of 2, both in fine yellow bronze (orichalcum), and the as semis and quadrans in common red bronze. The finer coins were struck on the standard of the as of a quarter of an uncia, the inferior ones on that of the half uncia. This gives the following proportionate values : Gold. 1 Silver. 11-91 1 Oriclialcum. 333-3 28 1 Bronze. 666-66 56 2 The as is nearly equal in size and weight to the dupondius, but is distinguished by its metal and inferior fabric. All the bronze bears the letters S.C., senatus consulto. Emperors not acknowledged by the senate are without bronze money ; thus we have no specimens of Otho or Pescennius Niger. Changes Nero reduced the aureus to ^th of the pound, and the denarius to under r^V-h, its purity being officially reduced. Under Trajan there was a later em- further debasement of the denarius. Marcus Aurelius fixed the perors. aureus, which had recovered its weight, at jVth of the pound ; the denarius had already been further debased, and under Septimius Severus it was half alloy. Caracalla introduced a new Coin, called after him the argenteus Antoninianus. It was struck at ^th to ^th of the pound, and seems to have been originally a double denarius struck on a lower standard. The characteristic of this coin is that the head of the emperor is radiate as Sol, that of the empress on a crescent as Luna. Under Elagabalus the taxes were paid in gold alone ; this was ruinous, for the treasury paid in debased silver at nominal value, which had to be used to purchase gold by the taxpayer at real value. Under Severus Alexander there was the latest large issue of denarii and sestertii. The senate made another effort to continue a bronze currency by striking under Philip the large bronze quinarius or Philippus rereus, while the base metal argenteus had become a piece of bronze washed with silver. At length in the time of Gallienus the argenteus contained no silver whatever, Aurelian (270-275 A.D.) attempted a reform of the coinage by which the previous coin was reduced from its nominal to its intrinsic value. The coins were now of tinned bronze and marked with their real value, 20 or 21 denarii of account, the signs XXI, KA (Greek), and XX being used as indexes of value. These coins replace at once the base silver and the bronze, which now disappear. The moneying right of the senate had become illusory by the deprecia tion of silver, which had ceased to have any real value. Aurelian entirely suppressed this right ; Tacitus and Florian restored it for a few years, after which the S.C. disappears from the coinage. The reform of Aurelian caused an outbreak at Rome which was of a serious character, but it was maintained by him and by Tacitus. Aurelian also suppressed all local mints but Alexandria. It was the work of Diocletian to restore the issue of relatively pure money in the three metals. Before 293 A.n. the coinage of silver recom mences with the denarius of the standard of Nero, TjVth of the pound, marked with the figures XCVI. Between 296 and 301 A. D. two tinned bronze coins were struck, the follis and the centenionalis. The follis was marked XXI, like the similar but very much smaller coin of Aurelian. The denarius was the unit of reckoning. Constantino, probably in 312 A.D., desiring to rectify the gold coinage, which had long been quite irregular in weight, reduced the chief gold piece to 7 Vd of the pound, and issued the solidus, a piece destined to play a great part in commercial history. It was never lowered in weight, though many centuries later it was debased, km" after it had become the parent of the gold coinages of Westerns and Easterns alike throughout the civilized world. The index LXXII is sometimes found on the first solidi ; and after 367 A.D., when the edict of Constantine was renewed, the Greek equivalent OB was constantly used. Under Constantius II. (360 A.D.) and Julian the silver denarius or argenteus was suppressed, and the siliqua of -r^th of the pound took its place. The follis having been withdrawn by Arcadius and Honorius, was reissued a century later by Zeno, with XL to indicate the value of 40 denarii. It will be seen that a fuller system of bronze was originated by Ana- stasius, the Byzantine emperor. Under Augustus the Pvoman monetary system became the official Provin- standard of the empire, and no local mint could exist without the cial imperial licence. Thus the Greek imperial money is strictly mints. Roman money coined in the provinces, with the legends and types of the towns. Many cities were allowed to strike bronze, several silver, and one, Cresarea in Cappadocia, gold. The silver becomes limited about Nero s time, but lasts under the Antonines. After- Avards there are a few currencies of base metal. The bronze in creased in mints and quantity in the second century, but, through the debasement of the Roman silver, one city after another ceased to strike about the middle of the third. Only Alexandria and Antioch survived by following the tactics of Rome with their own base metal coins. Purely Roman gold and silver was coined in certain of the provinces, in Spain and Gaul, and at the cities of Antioch and Ephesus. When the base silver had driven the Greek imperial bronze out of circulation, Gallienus established local mints which struck in pure Roman types. Diocletian increased the number of these mints, which lasted until the fall of the empire of the West, and in the East longer. These mints were, with others added later, Londinium (or Augusta), Camulodunum, Treviri, Lugdunum, Are- late (or Constantina), Ambianum, Tarraco, Carthago, Roma, Ostia, Aquileia, Mediolanum, Siscia, Serdica, Sirmium, Thessalonica, Con- stantinopolis, Heraclea, Nicomedia, Cyzicus, Antiochia (ultimately Theupolis), and Alexandria. A few were speedily abandoned. The obverse type of the imperial coins is the portrait of an Types imperial personage, emperor, empress, or Caesar. It begins under and Julius Cresar, though the republican money goes on under Augustus, inscrip- in whose reign the privileges of the moneyers ceased. The type tions. only varies in the treatment of the head or bust, if male, laureate, radiate, or bare ; if female, sometimes veiled, but usually bare. The reverse types of the pagan period are mythological of divinities, allegorical of personifications, historical of the acts of the emperors. Thus the coins of Hadrian, besides bearing the figures of the chief divinities of Rome, commemorate by allegorical representations of countries or cities the emperor s progresses, and by actual repre sentations his architectural works. The inscriptions are either simply descriptive, such as the emperor s names and titles in the nominative on the obverse, or partly on the obverse and partly on the reverse, and the name of the subject on the reverse ; or else they are dedicatory, the imperial names and titles being given on the obverse in the dative and the name of the type on the reverse. Sometimes the reverse bears a directly dedicatory inscrip tion to the emperor. The inscriptions on the earlier imperial coins from Tiberius to Severus Alexander are generally chronological, usually giving the current or last consulship of the emperor and his tribunitian year. In the latter part of the third century the mints are indicated by abbreviations in the exergue of the reverse, with also the number of the issue. There are sometimes signs of value in the field of the reverse. These characteristics apply to the pagan empire ; under the Christian empire there are modifica tions, mainly in the character of the reverse types. These are generally allegorical and free from pagan intention, though their source is pagan, as in the common types of Victory. Purely Christ ian types are rare. The most remarkable is the Christian mono gram formed of the Greek letters XP. The inscriptions are simpler, and in the reverses necessarily show the same change as the types. Of great interest is the inscription HOC SIGNO VICTOR ERIS, on coins dating not long after the victory of Constantine over Licinius. There is some variety in both types and inscriptions, but little that is absolutely new. The art of Roman imperial coins, although far inferior to that Art of of Greek, is well worthy of study in its best ages, for its intrinsic imperial merit, for its illustration of contemporary sculpture, and on account coins, of the influence it exercised on mediaeval and modern art. _ These coins were first designed under the revival of Greek art, during the influence of the New Attic school. The Romans had properly no art of their own. Their greatest temples and the statues of their gods were copies or imitations by Greeks of Greek originals, besides such earlier statues as were brought from Greece. The Greeks who were first called in to work for their masters were the artists of a ! school which was emphatically imitative, not in any way inventive, j and their successors were debased by the false taste of their patrons.