Cheats, of course, long precede the advent of the Greek invention of money six centuries before the birth of Christ. It is hard to imagine that there was ever an age when man did not yield to the temptation of taking a better deal than he should have merited when chimps – and far down the evolutionary line – will routinely steal from their community members.

The Roman moral code was burned into the psyche of its people at an early age with a long list of desirable virtues. There was loyalty and honor of course. Self-sacrifice, duty, labor and a long list of macho qualities were expected of the boy while the virtuous Roman lady was to adhere to ideals of demureness, loyalty and modesty while simultaneously being expected to be fertile mothers committed to domestic servitude. But if there were any Thou Shalt Not Steal imperatives these were reserved to the hushed scolds of a family’s confines yet altogether unworthy of being committed to the stone tablets that instilled the important values.

It is in this light perhaps not too surprising to find that Roman coins are peppered with evidence of cheating. While counterfeiting took many forms, in Roman coinage the most famous examples are the silver fourrées; a French term meaning “stuffed” which figuratively indicates the nature of a coin whose bulk is made up of scrap metal and only bearing a thin plating of actual silver. Clearly, the motive here was for the ancient bearer to stiff the seller much in the same way a phony $20 dollar bill made in Mexico may hopefully pass the scrutiny of a cash register manned by a teenager.

So far none of this is an eye-opener. What is controversial, and perhaps an idea so far not postulated, is that rather than the efforts of amateurs and freelance ne’er do wells it may have been the Roman government who was doing most of the cheating. Groupthink reflexively attributes the fourree to enterprising individuals whose skill at imitating official product must have been good enough to fool the watchdogs for personal profit. But there are several problems with this theory.

In the first case there was the powerful disincentive over the consequences of getting caught with a handful of bogus coins. Roman law, as you can imagine, had little in the way of “due process” when it came to these shenanigans. If justice was meted swiftly and harshly to noblemen and commoners alike – and whether actually guilty or innocent – then little mercy could be expected from getting caught red-handed with contraband of this kind. The sheer effort expended in producing these lookalike coins meant a huge investment in both time and money to get any sort of meaningful output going. And you needed top engravers too – the very sort that the official mints would have been seeking to employ. While there is no reason to suspect that it was out of the question for an individual to accomplish this feat successfully, the obstacles to overcome would scarcely make the project profitable. More likely, it would have required organized crime to pull it off. The Roman economy though was always the empire’s Achilles’ heel and the state could have been expected to have spent a disproportionate amount of its resources in combating efforts to undermine it – just as is the case in the U.S. today where counterfeiting dollars consistently ranks as among the most likely of crimes to land you in jail.

Not that counterfeiting in general was dangerous or uncommon in the Roman age and in its marketplaces. It was, in fact, teeming with fake stuff. The Roman historian Pliny the Elder frequently mentions the nature of the second-rate being passed off as the real thing with pained tips on how to spot the suspect. Those crafty Romans were good at manufacturing all manner of knockoff luxury goods from high-end food to jewelry to wall paint – and none of it apparently illegal as such. If you got less than you bargained for that was your problem. Caveat emptor indeed!

To dabble in a bit of Victorian sleuthing we are reminded that once you do away with the impossibles then we are left with the truth however unlikely it may be. If individuals would not likely have formed any great part of the black market in phony coins, and the Roman mob would have likely targeted far less risky money-making ventures, then the only extant conclusion is that it was the government itself who was likely in on the take.

Evidence towards this is subtle and circumstantial but compelling nonetheless. First of all there was constant pressing need, and endless temptation, to swell the treasury reserves to pay for grand building projects or make soldier payroll; this last example being notoriously dangerous to miss! While it’s possible that a policy of swindling the public directly via executive mandate was the rule, as was the case with Nero’s silver downgrade coinage in 64 AD, more likely the action typically happened farther downstream with mid-level functionaries who could have both the means and inclination to effect schemes whereby a die here and there could be procured at the mint and put to surreptitious use.

While fourrees are found with styling clues that differ from official guidelines, particularly evident in the sometimes corrupted legends of early imperial denarii, by and large the norm is that they are perfect copies of their contemporary prototypes and only evident to modern collectors when the surface is breached to show the cheap metal core underneath or a scale shows it to be too far outside of the normal weight range. On another aspect, I know of no fourree which is die linked to another coin known to be genuine – an indication that would clearly prove governmental involvement – but this can easily be explained as being the first rule of the savvy counterfeiter for to do otherwise, to mix the signature of his handiwork with bogus and legit product alike, would only implicate him into a speedy, summary execution once the link was found. Keeping the two lines of operation separate at a minimum gives the outfit a certain degree of plausible deniability.

In conclusion, there is little reason to believe that in ancient times government officials were any less corruptible than our modern counterparts. It seems they, and only they, had the means to fabricate superficially credible pieces on an industrial scale and, really, the mind can’t even come close to numbering all the reasons why they would have chosen to do so.

Photographing coins is often an unnerving process for those who need to sell one or just have an image to share. They’re small and hard to photograph well because the camera has a hard time focusing so close or the light won’t cooperate or the color looks awful or maybe all of those. It sure took me a long time to stop pulling my hair and get to the point where I could be proud of my efforts.

And today I start all over again with my first dip into photomicrography; the art and science of imaging under the magnification of a microscope. The results I’m about to share below will to my own eyes someday, I’m sure, rank as an embarrassment but all the same I’m eager to explore virgin territory. And despite a lot of Googling I can’t find any good photos of coins taken under a microscope. Sure, lots of pennies with big dates and so on but nothing you wouldn’t see under a cheap magnifier yourself. Nothing to really show you what it’s like down there at the level you can wave hello at a paramecium. That was my goal today.

So anyway, let’s start off on our journey into making an old, ahem ancient, coin really big on screen! I’ve selected this siliqua of Constantius II mainly because it has low relief and being of shiny silver will pose fewer lighting headaches since as you increase magnification the available light at any given power reduces proportionally so that under high magnification you need a very strong light and/or long exposure times to properly expose the image. And, because of difficult to dampen micro vibrations, long exposures are the bane of a photographer looking for sharp detail.

Here for our first image is this coin at lifesize, 1x and our starting point for reference. Depending on your monitor it might look a little smaller than a coin should be but this is likely because we’re accustomed to seeing coins on the internet blown up. At 20mm in circumference it’s a smidge smaller than an American nickel. Overlay a coin of this size on your monitor to make sure we’re all working with the same scale.

Now let’s turn up the juice.

Here we see the coin now at about 15x, a big enlargement that has made this coin almost the size of a dinner plate. At this size we clearly begin to see the tortured topography of this ancient metal… but I’ve cheated. This magnification did not come from a microscope but from the raw resolving power of the camera and lens alone.

Here is our first bona fide picture under a microscope.

Blow up the coin forty times its normal size and the surface appears very rough and pitted but the lettering is still tidy and recognizable overall. At this scale a coin of this size would be bigger than a giant New York-style pizza. Let’s make it bigger still.

The tiny letter V in the actual-size image at top, the one that is virile and elegant at 15x and faded at 40x, is now appearing like an angry metal jungle cratered nearly beyond recognition. At this scale you would need a 12ft screen long to see the whole coin. Now for our last image…

Our final stop sees me crank the power up to about 200x. I can’t be sure for certain given a number of different factors to consider but it’s in the ballpark. And the valley of that V has now become a moonscape with deep craters and metallic glints blurred by cheap Chinese optics that in sum render an abstract image which brings to mind anything other than a coin!

And if you thought likening that image to the moon was accurate, this section below from a gold solidus should resemble a Martian landscape. What do you think?

Rome, like any modern country, had its share of economic ups and downs. And unlike nowadays, they didn’t have the option of printing their way out of fiscal troubles. At times like these, faced between the rock of increased labor and production costs and the hard place of needing to pay for essential services, the treasury had no recourse but to resort to the usual dirty tricks of increasing the official value of the coins while often decreasing their intrinsic worth simultaneously. It is the perfect equivalent of the Weimar years in post-World War II and, more recently, Zimbabwe when these governments resorted to printing ridiculously large numbers on paper notes in a hopeless bid to outpace inflation.

An economist from the Middle Ages named Thomas Gresham famously noted that when a government issues new money whose face value is more than that which is circulating the resulting consequence is that the public will immediately hoard the old coins. This is now summed in the phrase “bad money drives out good money” and has the additional consequence of doubly undermining the government efforts by creating an acute shortage of circulating coins thus causing the treasury the added expense of ramping up production when they’re least able to respond appropriately. If the crisis is overcome the exhausted public coffers will leave no choice but to consider a new devaluation which only threatens to drive the economy into a self-perpetuation cycle. Again, modern economies are able to buffer inflationary bouts more effectively than their metal-based counterparts of yore only in the sense that paper is much cheaper but, ultimately, the end phase remains invariable: if the economy can’t recover by somehow acquiring wealth it implodes and becomes vulnerable to an internal or foreign takeover who do have the means. It is the underlying value of those means that then will determine the strength of the new economy and the “shares” that each of its coins or notes are worth.

Getting back to the coinage of the Romans, an emperor who had to witness the unsavory fact of a ledger sheet written in red ink was moved to quick action if he knew what was good for him. Any handy casus belli could be employed to take one’s chances at warring with a rich neighbor when the odds of sitting it out on the sidelines hoping for a miracle was much worse. And in a pinch you could plunder your own people too with the wealthy but scandal-prone elites and the disempowered plebs alike making such tempting targets.

The first emperor to meet the long arm of the Gresham law was Nero who witnessed, fiddling or not, a large chunk of the empire’s wealth go up in smoke when the capital so famously caught fire. Faced with the extraordinary expense of rebuilding, Nero hastily approved a measure to scale back the purity and weight of the sacrosanct denarius (and a bit off the weight of the aureus too). If he thought he’d actually get away with pulling the wool over the eyes of his citizens he really missed the mark. Word spread quickly and the old coins were yanked to be hoarded or melted down. It’s important to note that it wasn’t just the ordinary citizens and merchants who did this – the central exchequer would have naturally had first dibs to melt down their own stock and recoin it into an instant 10% or so profit. Except, well, now that the word was out prices shot up at least 10% (and almost assuredly more) instantly wiping out the advantage. In the end, Nero had to take it in the shorts and paid for the entire cost of the relief efforts and his building programs out of a combination of his own funds and new taxes. The important lesson learned was that the real cost of a devaluing economy can’t be hidden or repaired with financial tricks.

Another lesson, this one not fully appreciated by anyone at the time, was that the slope had been greased so to speak. Once Nero had set this precedent an insidious virus was injected into the economy whereby with that first inflationary spasm that shook the once-sound system the negative momentum built into a never-ending cat-and-mouse game. The next emperor, thinking himself either clever or out of alternative resources, allowed the robbing of a little more of the silver out of the denarius only to witness the inexorable spike in prices afterwards. Done by slight degrees over the course of years, as opposed to Neronian double-digit shocks overnight, the populace at least would not rush to send yesterday’s coins to the cooking pot. This policy would be a curious variant of the economic bubble we’ve come to experience in today’s global world except the “pop” in their case happened when there was literally no more silver to take out.

It had been a fortunate set of circumstances that generations of imperial families could count on the fact that a little silver can make a lot of junk metal look acceptably silvery when coined thus sparing the worst of the public outrage. But the noble metal’s property of visually hiding its inferior cousins gives out at around the 20% mark. The Gordians, then the Philips and finally the flurry of short-term emperors who followed had each eked out their share and now the next stable government under Valerian and Gallienus inherited a coin that was very nearly 80% scrap. They found themselves in that uncomfortable place between the rock and hard place for debasing the coin any further – while still attempting to pass it off as a bona fide “silver” coin – would not be possible and yet inflation still pressed ever forward.

At this point some hack genius came up with the idea of saving nearly all of that remaining 20% fineness per coin and blast-wash a few microns’ worth of the metal onto the surface while the structural core was allowed to be made up of an unholy witch’s brew of lead, copper, tin and whatever else was handy. Dressed in its beautiful if delicate veneer, the currency remained viable for another couple of decades until even this little silvery breath became too expensive a luxury.

The denarius had been phased out after first suffering the indignity of being whacked a little harder so as to appear bigger and sporting a slightly altered design than had been the convention then forced onto the public as worth two of the old. But its successor, the so-called antoninianus, now divorced even of that minimal silver content inspired little confidence and inflation’s pace quickened to a scale that was sending large swathes of the population into poverty and the whole of the Roman world flirted with complete civil breakdown. At this point, late in the third century, the king of this world was a man named Diocletian and of his character we can say that he was far more ambitious than savvy but we can also charitably add the credit that he was a man of action who was willing to enact wholesale changes and hope for the best.

Primary among his economic reforms was a naive attempt at fixing the price of goods. The reasoning was just as compelling as had been Nero’s: stopping inflation by decree would stabilize the economy and stave off revolution. How exactly he hoped this would work is unclear but perhaps his ace in the hole was a clause to revive the denarius. Not with a pinch of silver mind you but an honest-to-goodness hefty and nearly pure silver coin like had been in use back in the day. In principle, this was an awesome idea had it not been for the singular flaw that Diocletian simply didn’t have anywhere near the amount necessary to prop the economy back to the Julio-Claudian rates. He made a paltry trickle of them which ended up trading at some obscene multiple of the olden-day denarius. And here’s the kicker: what good is this perfectly rendered coin if no one can afford it? The average family had no access to these high-value jewels and thus became irrelevant to them and the marketplace. Meanwhile, the merchants now forced to sell their goods at the fixed prices set by Diocletian could no longer make a profit so trade plummeted and the middle class atrophied to join the level of the desperate crowd. Diocletian’s experiment had failed.

In retrospect, it’s easy to blame Nero for the emasculation of Rome’s currency but this would be scapegoating. The fact, again, is that real wealth dictates the soundness of the economy and as the Romans spent more silver than they were able to rake in the fact is that they only had themselves to blame. Without meaning to go off on a tangent, it’s difficult to miss the parallels with our modern economy where the West, anchored as they are onto the Dollar and Euro, are steadily losing value for the same reasons. The difference is as skin-deep as Gallienus’s silver wash because much of the real worth of these two mega-currencies is bound in the shrinking economies they underwrite. The burgeoning national debts of the leading nations of the west reflect the same working principles as the Romans spending silver faster than they could replenish the stores. As our wealth dissipates to the oil-rich countries of the Middle East and to China, the world’s factory, we carry on in denial that we live in a house of cards simply because our modern money is still able to buy us the stuff we need. All because that metaphoric splash of silver lulls the buying world into the comfort of seeming permanence. Let’s hope the silver doesn’t run out then.

In retrospect again, we should consider that in the end civil war for Rome was inevitable and, collectively, the empire fractured into fiefdoms led by mutually hostile chieftains. The Roman people had now entered a strife-ridden era of decline that was to last hundreds of years and as it did so the wars and malnutrition that ensued decimated the population. Impoverished and depopulated, the far-flung provinces became easy targets to enemy nations and the ruling class hunched in the remaining urban corners and a new age quite unlike the one of Nero’s time ushered in for the next thousand years.

I’ve waited a long time to come out with a dirty little secret.

In early 2008 I traveled on a six-week long European tour in preparation for my then nearing-completion ERIC II book on coins. One day while walking around the deserted grounds of what was once a minor Roman city called Grumentum, now turned historical park, my downwards gaze caught what I’d been longing to glimpse for years: my very own find of a Roman coin.

I had metal detected before back in the states when I was in college in the early 90′s as a pastime. It was always a rush to find that one Mercury dime or even a wheat penny out of the dozens of trash pull tabs and rotten zinc pennies. This though was a rush of a higher order. I’d been anticipating the eventuality prior to the trip and to bolster these hopes I’d brought with me a new metal detector even though I was afraid to use it, or even get caught with it still boxed up, as it’s outlawed in many European countries. And using it within the boundaries of an archaeological park was unthinkable. Which made that day’s find all the more sweet considering I’d had the luck to find it while just walking around. It was just there, sitting on the ground a shade of green like a sliver of the Statue of Liberty against the earth and only a few inches off a sidewalk built by men who spoke Latin and whose great-great-great-grandchildren died many centuries ago. Who knows how many people had walked that same length of sidewalk since then, starting from the original owner whose careless slip may have cost him a reprimanding perhaps but whose next owner would so enthrall him?

I did not want to spare the ultra-geekiness of the occasion. For a couple of minutes I savored, really relished, this feeling, ineffable to description, of knowing I at last held a man-made object whose direct line of ownership passed from one anonymous Roman to me with no intermediaries howsoever temporary. Wondrous though the experience had been of handling hundreds of thousands of other ancient coins prior to this moment that all really paled in the transcendence of the link I felt on that wintry day in Grumento. And then, after I exhausted that high, came an unexpected question from my conscience: “What do I do with it?”

I think that deep down I knew I was going to take it but at the moment my superego, that Freudian construct more familiar as the metaphor of the angel-on-the-shoulder counterweight to the devil on the other side, sure put up a respectable fight. A museum with a scrappy, low-budget display of finds from previous archeological digs within the park, should be told about this find. Maybe even left in situ while the staff dutifully took notes of the location and prepare records that in some small way help humanity understand itself. But in my fantasies no denouement figured in such a selfless act to martyr my desire for possessing this ratty little piece of metal. And it was so dirty, so thoroughly featureless under corrosion, that even in my professional capacity I would have been unable to say virtually anything about it. So into my pocket it went and eventually flew Continental from CDG to ORD and then to its new home halfway around the world in Washington state where it sits on the pedestal of my monitor and gets an appreciative rub or two every day.

In the grand scheme of things I justified my taking the little coin a million different ways including, most compellingly perhaps, that an act of publishing such as this would be an honor the coin would never have received in the otherwise unremarkable storage it would have gotten at the local museum. All the same, the fact that I struggled – am obviously *still* struggling – indicates my guilt at not sacrificing my selfish desire for the greater good of the public. But have I really done any wrong?

For now, I’m okay with leaving the question unanswered. In the meantime, I can say that after having rubbed it daily for a couple of years the coin has revealed the faintest outlines of a portrait and even the merest whisper of letters “IVS”. The tails side still eludes complete certainty but am now fairly convinced it is an ordinary FEL TEMP REPARATIO soldier-spearing-horseman type; perhaps the most ordinary of all Roman coins minted by one its most prolific minters, Constantius II. Ordinary, yet so extraordinary!

The average person with a beginning interest in ancient coins will find Roman coins in particular the most accessible. As I’ve made the case in other venues, the coins of other major civilizations despite being intriguing in their history and haunting in their unique designs are unfortunately inscribed in glyphs that are difficult to comprehend to most Westerners. Of the many legacies Rome has handed down through the millennia none however matches the raw utility of their most fundamental contribution to our cultural infrastructure: the alphabet.

It is truly an unheralded miracle that a handful of Etruscans on the dawn of history could have engineered a system with which to convey the most complex and nuanced human thought with a palette of but twenty graceful characters. They did so using the already long-established Greek alphabet as a starting point and, of course I can’t prove this, aimed at coming up with a new set that would be easier to write quickly by hand and chisel into marble. The more tortuously curvy and size-disparate of these they whipped into angular shapes consisting of generally equal-length strokes and minimal sloping that would be easily reproducible at speed yet maintain sufficient distinction between each other to avoid unnecessary confusion. If it sounds simple it is only because a lifetime of everyday usage clouds the significance. Yet, the naked fact that the alphabet from that point forward some 2,500 years ago has hardly changed to this day, and indeed has rapidly become globalized, is all the testament needed to validate the greatness of their innovation.

By the beginning of the imperial age the Romans had reached a level of consistency in their script that was unmatched until the invention of movable type over a millennium later and reached its apogee during the Julio-Claudian years. The way the letters were rendered was an elegant style so widely disseminated, so fussed over in execution, that it became the world’s first and most enduring font. While in commerce the serif-less Helvetica has largely replaced Times New Roman, the 20^th century implementation of this legendary font, the elder script is still preferred in literature, law and particularly architecture where it would seem almost unnatural to carve into stone any style other than the granddaddy of all.

Despite their remarkable consistency in the core fundamentals the Roman era was nevertheless subject to evolution and, as elsewhere in art and fashion, stylistic flourishes migrated to the written word. Roman coins again are a very reliable record of these changes and, due to the ease with which they can be dated, provide an equally easy means with which to in turn date inscriptions in stone, metal and other media which would otherwise be of ambiguous chronology.

There are roughly five main epigraphic style groups. The nascent first period of the Republic is mainly distinguished in its overall freer hand that places emphasis on ease of execution for the writer and legibility. While greater care is of course invested in the careful engraving for monuments the coins do not yet show the same stickler spirit.

Then, rapidly, the Augustan age gives birth to master artisans who commit their labor into the sublimely finished works that are demanded by a burgeoning and sophisticated upper class. The Caesar likewise sees but liability in the sloppy execution of his name or a depicted god committed unto those millions of silvery ambassadors that will travel within and beyond the borders. They must be slick and must do their equal part in commanding the awe of the beholder so high-grade typography is mandated.

Not until the third century do we begin to see a decline that mirrors in kind the waning state of the empire’s fortunes. At first the degradation is just barely perceptible; a slight increase in typos here, a drop in spacing precision there… and before you know it in the mid-250’s there are unmistakable signs that the coins, at least, are no longer being as fastidiously designed (much less manufactured) as they once were. An ‘M’ that takes only slight care to assess the correct slope for its central strokes to touch at their ends now typically becomes just a sloppy IVI and likewise with the A’s that more resemble H’s and R’s which warp into ugly degenerates that seem to be a cross between a D and a Q.

The decline in lettering must have alarmed the more learned and artistically gifted future emperors, or perhaps we may credit a non-imperial source but either way the late 3^rd century and into the fourth there is again a shift towards neoclassical forms even if never again achieving the initial level of detail and quality control. Notably, whereas the Julio-Claudian lettering tended to be tall and graceful, the letters of this age are more compact and with rather haphazard, stocky serifs but still given emphasis on maintaining correct leading (letter-to-letter spacing) and vertical evenness.

The fifth and final century sees a comparatively sudden and irreversible collapse in all care of design and workmanship. In the precious metal coinage the typography is still unmistakably Roman but the style is highly irregular, rushed and – horrors of horrors – liberally peppered with illiterate touches like reversed N’s and S’s and foreign letter-forms.

What part of the Roman soul of ancient survives 476 AD is scattered in different directions. In time, the lay Roman had forgotten his ancient skills and the people’s Latin evolved into Italian. However, that rich lexicography and the art of the scribe had survived unharmed within the protected innards of monasteries. Here the vocal and written Latin, and in fact the whole body of Roman literature, was to be carefully – even obsessively – preserved. True, it would be continually nourished and molded into the service of promoting Christianity but it would be preserved all the same.

I’ve been asked to provide an opinion on the ethics of collecting ancient artifacts. In my case it’s not that I was turning a blind eye to the issue so much as that it’s one that’s already been covered to death in the press that serves this community. Rather than just predictably justifying the side of those in favor of preserving the rights of collectors (noting how after all I am heading a company that deals in ancient coins!) perhaps I can pose the question more broadly and make its answers both more informative and introspective.

First, for the benefit of those new to the debate, the trade of antiquities is a business mired in controversy. There are two opposed camps and both have spokesmen making an effort to shape public opinion. On the one extreme there is a coalition of scholars and politicians who for differing reasons lump any and all those owning or otherwise doing business in antiquities as though they were the lowliest members of the seamy underbelly of society. At the other end is an equally vocal, equally intransigent, group who view any and all proposed revisions in the way antiquities are traded as stalinist encroachments on our constitutional freedoms and couch any dissent, from within even, in the language reserved to reproach the vilest of tyrants. And those with more moderate views are generally ignored or regarded with contempt or condescension by both sides alike.

So what fuels this rage anyway? The passion is rooted in a subject as ancient as the artifacts collectors crave: the rights of ownership. In the 18th century , a philosopher named John Locke first analyzed what it meant to “own” something and on what grounds he may claim this right in a moral sense. His thesis came to the conclusion that rightful ownership rested on the expenditure of labor. To use the model most accessible in his vision, an unclaimed plot of land begat an owner once it was farmed and tended. The work invested was by itself the action that conferred the deed. No outsider, and in pointed reference Locke includes a government, may strip the worker from his land without first compensating him for his investment. In everyday commerce you and I rarely run into problems since we buy and sell goods whose ownership is never in question. There is seldom the case, as it were, that we come across abandoned property which through our labor we may enhance its value because, unlike in ancient times or even the 18th century, pretty much everything out there either already has an owner or is quite inaccessible (outer space, the bottom of the ocean).

The accepted paradigm, of course, breaks down once we come across an ancient artifact. The typical artifact has been abandoned for hundreds or even thousands of years. The controversy springs from the lack of a framework with which we may comprehend this concept. Does it belong to the nation upon whose soil it was found, does it belong to the finder or does it belong to “everyone”? This is the real question to ponder and in each case the proponents have both flaws and merits to their position.

The nation may provide a compelling argument that its cultural identity belongs with the understanding and the caretaking of the possessions of its ancestors. But rarely is the case that the ancestral lands bear a tangible and exclusive link to the people that now occupy the lands and define this nation. A viking artifact recovered from Canada may belong as much to Canada as it might to Scandinavia – or even the Indian ancestral lands upon which it was first deposited. The detritus left behind by the Romans cannot be said to be the patrimony of Italy, the chief but still only one of many of its provinces. And so on.

Likewise, an archeologist may make a good case that despoiling a site of its treasures robs the collective of an important puzzle piece to decoding the past. Yes, this much may be true but does it constitute a legally valid argument in and of itself? We can, to use Locke’s analogy, surely detest the farmer for razing a desirable structure on his lands to replace it with some tacky substitute but we stop at gritting our teeth for we recognize his prerogative. Artifacts pried from a protected site with ongoing excavations is one thing and a bunch of coins plowed up in a nondescript farm somewhere is quite another – yet the archeological community makes of the two no distinction.

The finder’s case is as crass as it is unwavering: it’s mine ’cause I found it and that’s that. His selfishness aids no one but himself and through his act convincingly imperils our ability to understand the past. But on what weighty grounds may we contest his claim? Can we furthermore punch holes in his position if he has already invested the labor of conservation upon his recovered artifact? In the end it’s often the law that steps in to redress the grievances laid out by groups representing the interests of the archeologists and those, of course, that represent the lawmakers (the nation again) but it should hardly be surprising that the law follows political lines and these respond better to the needs of the few than to the needs of the individual. And so we find that the finder often doesn’t get to keep but instead has his finds confiscated under any number of statutory faults and its reasonings need not even be airtight (that’s for the courts to decide later) but let’s be candid and remember that the law and ethics are two separate things that must not be equated.

And I did say, didn’t I, that despite my personal leanings that there is more room left for introspection than there is benefit in just adding more partisan heat onto this powder keg. The subject should be interesting even to those who are not directly affected either way and, so, hopefully points like these can help form a more balanced opinion – and thinktank ways to overcome the impasse.

Of all the endlessly fascinating questions we have about Rome one stands foremost. Why did the Roman empire fall anyway? We see today in that decrepit shell of what once was the legendary splendor and impressive achievements as admiringly reviewed by every civilization to follow. And we do it not without a trace of troubling introspection.

I summarized in the introduction of my recently published book ERIC II what I believe to be a compelling  answer to this question. Rome, to put it simply, ran out of money. Yes yes… let’s dutifully note the legendary wastefulness of the emperors and their palaces and banquets. Check on the list too for the deleterious effects of endless waves of marauding barbarians. Yeah, the lead in the pipes (right) and even the changes born of a quickly Christianizing proto-Europe. Say what you will but the bottom line is that the living heart of any empire, be it ancient, modern or future as long as homo sapiens is involved, is only as viable as its economy. And the economy, stupid, runs on money and nothing else.

Is this a bold statement? Well, before we take a look at the Romans why not browse over the demise of some more recent empires? The British empire, the first truly global one… did it not succumb because it had sucked the very life out of its many far-flung outposts and in so doing irremediably upset the locals into revolt in each case? Its crown jewel, the U.S., was not taxation without representation the seminal call to independence? What possible business does the crown have in establishing a presence in a place as inhospitable to your average pasty Englishman as, say, Rhodesia if not to drain its varied resources? The Spanish empire swallowed whole the Americas and siphoned god knows how many tons of gold and silver while giving but cranky missionaries and smallpox in return. The Soviet Union – do you really think it was sunk because of Reagan’s appeals to embrace freedom and democracy? More like Reaganomics. The Iron Curtain had to shift such a high percentage of its GDP into military spending to keep up that the rest of the country and its satellites were left in disastrous shape. And herein leads my thesis: that irrespective of size or era a community, nation or empire subsists solely insofar as its monetary health is not compromised. Withdraw the money pool and political instability is the guaranteed result. In fact, I can’t think of a single historically significant such community that did not thrive on the accumulation and trade of resources – or collapse when their availability was no more. And, before someone brings to point an example of a pre-coinage era (Egyptians, Mayans) no need to be pedantic: we may substitute the word money with capital or resources and maintain the strength of the argument.

Rome’s resources were not limitless. The grain, the silver, slaves… all that kept Rome flourishing in the early years. However, those gilded conduits flowed primarily because of their success at expansionism. Their military engine was more sophisticated than that of their neighbors and when these were conquered the Romans, innovatively, did not seek to destroy the vanquished but keep them instead as confederates that could generate more income and pump air into an economic balloon. But a balloon it was. The empire grew too fast and each succeeding province won was more expensive to subdue and administer. A Roman commander may have stepped foot as far away as present-day Afghanistan only to look back on a supply line stretching thousands of miles to Rome. The maintenance tab on those long-distance tendrils sapped the profits down to zero. Pop goes the bubble.

The decline of the Roman empire began, if we must pin an exact date, precisely the day Trajan gave up his sieges in Arabia. He headed home on a caravan swollen with other peoples’ money; a store so wealthy that it easily suckled the lifestyles of generations of spoiled emperors to come. But the clock had started ticking. Without war – for its mines had given out – Rome had far less capacity to generate income than to consume it. The evidence is hard to miss from all that strewn marble. Each of those monuments, from the lowliest statue to the aqueducts and the coliseum, is testament to a people who dedicated themselves to building for the sake of no loftier reason than the good life with nary a care for saving for a rainy day. It was, through and through, a consumerist society. With the singular though notable exception of its state-of-the-art road system you may look hard at the Roman way of life and find little evidence of an infrastructure that made any real attempt at becoming self-sufficient. Its trade deficit was simply epic: those highways were one-way tentacles radiating in every direction and designed strictly for suction, not for export. Carthage and Egypt provided food, from the east came spices and other luxury goods, from the north timber and slaves. And Rome in turn sold just about nothing with which to balance the spreadsheet. On the archeological record, look for any Roman presence outside of its borders and just about all you find are its coins. The coins, of course, which were made for buying foreign goods!

The spigot ran dry as did Trajan’s teat then crisis quickly ensued. Taxation, the laziest way to make money, is a worse than useless tool when used on an insolvent citizenry for it harvests but resentment. So with no money the fact that droves of Romans were trading their ancient gods for Jesus is largely irrelevant. That “moral decay” on which Rome’s fall is blamed – the endless partying and orgies and gladiatin’ and all that other showy opulence… is this in the least possible without a near-bottomless pit of money? That “depopulation” given as a contributing factor for the downfall, is this not a terminal symptom rather than a cause? What soldier risks life and limb for no pay when he is at the employ of a dissolute tyrant? Look at each of the traditional reasons given and see whether money, or rather the lack of it, is not the naked, ugly core of the problem. Of course the Romans were swept off the map by barbarians but they were the victors only to a golden crown on a rotted tooth.

And now comes that introspection part. Hasn’t it occurred to anyone yet that the U.S., and probably Europe too, shares an uncomfortable number of parallels with our western ancestors? Is that old maxim about those who don’t learn from history being condemned to repeat it not yet sinking in? Let’s pick at this scab once more. Our economy, as everyone knows, is practically a mirror of Rome’s old ways. Our own tentacles stretch from every zip code outwards, particularly to China, and disgorge their contents on the shelves at Walmart. We modern Romans send the modern-day Denarius to Shanghai and Stuttgart alike along with little else besides the next purchase order. Garbage, I kid you not, is our largest export and I think you will agree that garbage, as a commodity, is not very valuable. With each flatscreen tv we buy we sell back the cardboard and styrofoam it came in and by necessity a trade deficit grows on a par with that of old Rome. Each gallon of Arabian gas, each African diamond placed on a bride’s finger and each call to a help desk in India is just a new puff into a stretching balloon.

To be fair, Rome’s economy was vastly simpler than our own and the U.S. still creates a lot of wealth of its own accord. Exports and the global trade balance only tell part of the story. If the rest of the world were to be shut out from us somehow I envision an abysmal level of discomfort but we would somehow learn to cope and survive. However, the fundamental question remains: are we as a nation making more money than we’re spending? The only candid answer is no. And the answer to ponder, if we fail to consider the fate of the Romans or that of every other once-successful empire, should be quite disconcerting. It is in our human nature to overconsume and move on but earth, we’re told, is a prune on its way to a raisin.

Collectively we pay lip service to a green movement or a charity or some other feel-good cause by some symbolic token of personal sacrifice while only an insignificantly small number of people will commit to major life changes necessary in order to reach a self-sustaining balance. Let’s face it, we do this because it’s only normal, from the human perspective, to maximize our well-being and security with only half-hearted nods to the future. I very much doubt that as Romans contemplated the ominous signs in their own not-to-distant futures they forsook the pleasures of their baths and attending plays or eating exotic animals because curtailing those activities in the name of hoarding resources in case of crises is just not a very fun lifestyle. And before I lift a hypocritical finger at their excess I grin and note that last week I was bathing in Panama, am looking forward to trying out my first Kobe steak tonight and going to next week’s opening of Transformers with the kids. But what happens when the last coin is spent?

Roman coins come in all sizes and shapes, we know, and of these among the most controversial aren’t really coins at all. Relatively rare, a minor of class of semi-anonymous coinage carries, on the one side, a large Roman numeral and on the other (often) couples making love in explicit poses seemingly plucked straight out of the pages of the Kama Sutra. Probably no civilization as a whole is identified with raw sexuality as much as that of the Romans with surviving art pieces freely illustrated with the business of the flesh. Historians, tabloid gossipers and pretty much anyone with the ability to write back then delighted in describing the prurient perversions of others be they highborn or commoner. Yet its coinage is largely chaste to a fault. So what gives then?

Modern historians, often constrained within the bounds of propriety, have struggled to reconcile the significance of these naughty bits. Ignoring the elephant in the room, some have unconvincingly proffered their use as gaming tokens or event passes. Sooner or later the elephant has to be acknowleged and the baser use of facilitating the sex trade is given a chance.

Despite the halfhearted sanitizing attempt this much is hardly controversial. What’s the deal with the numbers though? Common thinking, likely born of an inspired moment in a smoky bar attended by off-duty historians, is that the number must tie into the featured act so that, in effect, the number becomes its price.

While no one without a time machine can say for sure, just using logic it really strains the mind that the token pictorial had anything whatever to do with the service the client was paying for! Prostitution the world over is a simple business that changes very little in its basics and, lacking anything weighty to the contrary, one must assume that these basics remained more or less the same across the ages as well. It is not practical for a big, modern brothel to have its staff mediate transactions between the sex worker and the client. It kills the vibe to say the least. It is much more efficient for the house to leave the particulars up to the individuals and charge admission or charge the prostitute for use of the facilities – or both. While management has an easier time regulating income this still leaves the prostitute without an easy means to get paid for her services. If the john pays cash where does she put it without it becoming a security risk? Also, if the john must pay for services repeatedly with his hard-earned coin, will he spend as freely?

Casinos pondered the practical – and psychological – implications long ago and came up with the devilishly effective solution of tokenry. Useful only within the confines of its facility was both a strong disincentive to theft as well as providing a subtly uninhibiting  effect when it came time to part with them. A brothel, which like a casino sells vice as its product, is the perfect analogy model and the two share identical problems and goals regarding discretion, security control and the fostering of an artificial environment conducive to carefree spending. Viewed in this light the raison d’etre for the numbers becomes clear: since the brothel is unable to issue plastic chips of varying colors to identify their value the numbers are the most plausible alternative. They weren’t the price, they were the value. And this value could have been arbitrary and non-linear. Numbers as high as XVI (16, for those of you unfamiliar with Latin number encoding) have been recorded but there is no indication whether that was the high- or low-mark or whether these values were preset at all. For all we know that VI in the image to left could have bought you a half hour of hanky panky with that new hottie slave just in from Persia. Maybe it was just the room number. In the end it’s irrelevant for it could mean anything including, yes, even the literal cost for such and such act. But, supposing for the sake of simplicity the numerals represented increasing worth, the “big chips” could have been internally broken down into fractions as needed. To sum, there is no doubt that within the brothel some services cost more than others (in fact, food, accessories and non-sexual services and items likely were sold on the premises too) but my point is that it’s incredibly naive to think that there was a direct and unyielding correlation between the scene depicted and its cost.

Seeing as how the spintriae were most likely brothel tokens, and additionally that the numbers did represent a value but not a specific cost, leaves us with a final question. Why if this system was so efficient did the spintriae seem to have been issued for only a few years? In other words, why was its implementation not widely institutionalized throughout the Roman age? This answer is troublingly elusive to me. Prostitution was by all reports an essential component of the economy and if the innovation of tokens made this particular business run so much smoother it stands to reason that it should have caught on. Certainly there is the possibility that the experiment failed for any number of reasons and it all reverted back to being handled in cash but when profits and security are at stake I resist such a facile explanation given what I know of human nature. Perhaps the business itself changed so that prostitution leaned ever more towards a back-to-basics ”pimps and hoes” streetside tricking (cheaper, less overhead). Or perhaps there was some other as-yet unseen factor that made the innovation unsatisfactory in the end. Maybe the fickle hand of imperial policy played a part.

Personally, after dicing away at the problem with my trusty occam’s razor, I’ve come to the conclusion that the most likely answer is not that the use of tokens went away at all but rather that it was taken to its next logical step in evolution. Couldn’t it be the case that the tokens were simply abandoned as too costly when some other stand-in could have been employed just as well? A brothel need not have required the commissioning of expensive metal trinkets when, say, a dyed rabbit’s foot or a wooden figurine of Pudicitia (har, har) could have done the job just as efficiently.

That’s Roman ingenuity at work for ya.

Astronomy, physics and mathematics are three fields that come to mind where radical new theories are continually proposed only to find inevitable resistance to their widespread adoption. Despite the ostensibly objective nature of the scientific method it ends up being the case that the promoters of a new thesis often end up “emotionally attached” and seek to advance their position while those holding on to the status quo refuse them for the same – or even political – reasons. The community then polarizes along progressive/conservative fault lines only for time, and hopefully lots of testing, to eventually determine whether the new paradigm takes root.

The world of numismatics, as elsewhere in the other sciences, often gets bogged down in controversies that to the outside world must seem utterly trivial. One such controversy divides a segment who call the post-Roman empire based out of Constantinople as the “Byzantines” from a spalling group who prefer a new moniker “Romaion”. As far as I can tell the replacement name was suggested by Wayne Sayles, a prominent dealer and author of literature on ancient numismatics. With him being the founder and editor of the only monthly magazine on ancient coins, the Celator, editorial policy is such that instances of “Byzantine” in articles are replaced with “Romaion”. Personal crusades spring from convictions, it’s true, and having the right pulpit is a good way to grease the skids into your position being accepted. In some cases the technique worked so well that the editor’s will alone was sufficient to reshape the literary landscape of an entire nation. Witness the success of the Chicago Tribune’s insistence on re-spelling the British “programme” into “program”. Then, as an example leading nowhere, contemplate the continued obstinacy of the New Yorker adorning diphthongs with diareses so that we get cutesy forms like coöperate.

Despite opposition, the power of media is sometimes enough to bring change. Now, by not accepting the new term in this instance, I find myself in a default “conservative” camp. I attribute my stubbornness to nothing more than the inertia of going along with what historians at large have been using for centuries for lack of any issue with the traditional name. Is there, I should ask, a compelling reason to adopt the new word? Am I finally an old fart?

To answer we should probably review why it was seen fit to suggest a replacement in the first place. There are a number of reasons why certain words fall into disuse. In medicine, for example, old terms like dropsy and apoplexy were replaced long ago with the newer edema and stroke on account of a greater understanding of these ailments. More commonly, and I suspect the case here as well, words fall out of favor when through colloquial usage they become profane. A hundred years ago calling someone a retard or negro (or worse, ahem!) carried far less negative baggage than does so today and so more neutral descriptives have been employed. The Romans’ “gentium barbarum” initially referred to all non-Roman people without the added weight that barbarism brings to mind. The Vandals, likewise, irrespective of whatever achievements and innovations they may have attained, will regardless trigger an automatic connection to vandalism and thus malign the memory of an entire civilization. In this context perhaps it was felt the time was ripe to retire Byzantine as a noun since as an adjective it links with thesaurus-mates conniving, subterfuge and red tape. Whatever merit the politically correct find in this cause is to me eye-rollingly inconsequential – the last Byzantine having died around the time Colombus set sail and all – but even if it were seriously considered I would say the proposed Romaion is a worse substitute on several accounts.

For starters, the argument goes, “Byzantine” is not a word that anyone used contemporarily; the term only coming into use during the 19th century and was in any case named from Byzantium, a city name that long predated the very people it meant to describe. Why not the more appropriate “Constantinoplan” perhaps? I don’t know. I wasn’t around back then but evidently succeeding historians adopted it without considering alternatives and that was that. On the other hand, the neologism Romaion is simply the Greek word for “Roman”. Any Roman who spoke Greek, whether an actual Greek person under Roman jurisdiction or an ordinary Roman living in Britain who happened to know Greek, would have called themselves as such across time and geography. It is thus too lexically imprecise to neatly rein in what we mean by Byzantine today. The argument that holds that it’s inappropriate in light of it not having been used contemporarily must reconcile the irony that Romaion is the very word they would have used to convey the concept of belonging to the older civilization rather than the intended disassociation into separate eras!

To poke another hole into the argument, an ordinary Roman who lived in what is now Greece and Turkey would have been regarded as simply Greek even when additionally, as an abstract and political concept, they were also Roman. This in the same way that for us it’s effortless to be considered, say, both a New Yorker and an American. Stripped of the pejorative concerns what other reason is there to fix that which ain’t broken? Japan, and its derivative Japanese, are both examples of a people given a demonym with which they themselves never had any part of. Nobody knows where “Japan” came from but it stuck and no one is seriously campaigning for the more etymologically pure Nippon and Nihongo. If Germans demand we rid them of their Latin shackles will we accept to call them Deutscher? Unthinkable.

Romaion therefore so far proves only to be an awkward and inexact term with no added benefit except, as far as I can see, divorce the people and period it describes from add-on connotations the word picked up along the way. It doesn’t work that way. Say Chinese or Mexican and perhaps less than desirable adjectives come to mind but the solution isn’t, and can’t be, a fresh coat of semantical paint. So the Vandals, bummer, will continue to be linked with rampaging riffraff and a Made in China tag will continue to inspire the dread of imminent malfunction. To the ghosts of ancient Greeks who lived in the Balkans and what is now Turkey during the approximate 400-1500 millenium, sorry, you are to us “Byzantine” and we mean no disrespect!

 

So how much were Roman coins worth in their day?

It’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer with any degree of certainty but it comes up often enough. The main problem is in trying to equate the buying power of ancient Rome with modern money. A dollar that buys a song online can’t be compared with coins used to buy slaves and rotting eels. Before we look at the available data there is another complicating factor in that inflation and the passage of time distorts the understanding of the purchasing power of the various denominations. Just, again, as a Civil War-era dollar doesn’t have the same purchasing power as a dollar does now.

We can nevertheless come up with some approximations. Some things, and sevices, are more or less timeless. Buying a loaf of bread or a haircut now or two thousand years ago is more or less the same experience and can at least be roughly compared to in terms of cost and effort to “produce”. If we knew the average Roman’s paycheck and what some of these basic staples cost back then, all for a given point in time, we could extrapolate by referencing how many haircuts or bread loaves the average person can buy today given a typical salary now. We don’t, unfortunately, have the full picture but we can come up with enough data to make some reasonable guesses.

The first century provides us with the most in-depth historical snapshots of Roman life thanks to Suetonius, Pliny and Cassius Dio. Suetonius writing around the year 100, for example, gives us some tantalizing tidbits. He notes that Domitian just a few years before had raised the annual salary of a common soldier by 25% from 9 to 12 Aurei. Since it’s obvious that soldiers weren’t paid nine (or twelve) coins in a year right there that tells us that he was talking the same way we would mention  an employee drawing fifty or a hundred thousand dollars: the yearly tally rather than the actual paycheck. Knowing that the Sestertius was valued at 1/100th the value of an Aureus it becomes much more likely that a soldier’s pay was given out in this denomination which would have been far more useful in the everyday commerce a soldier would have engaged in and, at let’s use the handy new payscale, 1200 Sesterces works out to an even 100 monthly.

Those soldiers however had to pay “taxes” in the form of deductions meant to offset the cost of room and board, training and their gear, none of which was free, so that the actual take-home amount was significantly less. How much their real pay, above and beyond the costs they were required to reimburse the state, is somewhat vague; perhaps half their gross had to be turned over for these off-the-top expenses. On the other hand though we can assume that they supplemented their income in any imaginable number of ways loosely controlled weaponized authority figures could get away with. So, for a working figure, let’s assume that after all was said and done that this soldier managed a clean 100 Sesterces a month and this figure being good for a generation either side of the year 100 AD.

The non-commissioned soldier of Domitian’s time was regarded as a blue collar earner. A state pension for successful retirement following a 25-year career, the statistical chances of whose completion must have been dismally small, could have been a distant dream new enrollees looked forward to since it was valued at a pound of gold. That works out to a little over $20,000 today… a figure that while seemingly very humble for such dedicated service must nevertheless be taken into the context that this ancient Roman likely had very humble expenses to begin with. Twenty g’s buys a lot of cheap wine and wheat grain after all and you may consider that most people in the third world today, whose buying needs much more closely parallel those of an ordinary Roman, get by without ever seeing a similar lump sum payout.

So assuming this yardstick of 100 Sesterces a month were to be considered a decent salary for a typical worker of low- to medium-skill this works out to somewhere between three and four of these big coins with which to carry the day for a proverbial family of four – or we can round up to an even four, a Denarius, just for the sake of round numbers. With the average salary for someone in this skill-range in the U.S. hovering around $40,000 a year (let’s assume a net of $32,000 after taxes or  around $90 a day) it’s tempting to draw a quick analogy to conclude that a Denarius had back then the same buying power as $90 does today. But is this even roughly accurate?

In order to answer that I’ve taken some assumptions that may not hold true and, in any case, we have yet to list the costs of any goods during Roman times. Let’s do a little stress testing and see how our figures are holding up. Fortunately, one missing piece of the puzzle is not only known but is also contemporary to this era: the Pompeii disaster locked in pricing tables for a number of generic commodities current to the Autumn of 79. In it we learn a particularly useful price for bread which, again, we can take as a good reference point of value across the ages since a handmade loaf must have been just about as hard and costly to make back then as it is now. That price was one As, a sixteenth of a Denarius. Does then a loaf of artisan (handmade) bread today run about $90/16=$5.60? I’d say this is spookily close to shopping in the Whole Foods bakery section. Really not a bad stab initial conclusion. It is even more impressive if we take that price and transpose it to a country like Zambia or Bolivia where it would run maybe a dollar and where the labor of a baker is likely much more commensurate with that of an ancient Roman. But, either way, this workup is perhaps a lucky strike and we really need some more numbers before we feel confident about these valuations.

Just after Domitian comes Nerva who Suetonius tells us started a program to help orphaned children. A state stipend of 16 monthly Sesterces for boys and 12 for girls would be allotted by the state. Assuming that one of these kids would have depended entirely on this stipend that works out to a daily Dupondius for him and about an As-and-a-half for her which leaves them to fend for themselves with a pound of bread and a few pennies for other expenses on which to live off. Considering that they would in all likelihood supplement this with handouts, odd jobs and maybe a little thieving here and there, the way they would have gotten by just prior to Nerva’s munificence, for an indigent’s standards this does not sound bad at all. Taking our 5-and-change computation on the worth of an As this would work out to about a thousand dollars a year free from uncle Nerva. And that’s surely more than kids in a Mexican slum make per annum.

In the end are we comfortable saying that a Denarius should be worth about $90? It has been estimated at less. Someone once came up with $20 using similar methods and while not very generous the figure still works (that artisan bread now costing a measly $1.25 which is still accurate if we shop for it at Costco (or a third world country!)). Pompeii also gives us that a tall glass of wine, the vintage 79 sort suitable for a not-too-discriminating lunch, also costs an As. Again, whether we use the lower or the higher figure this is still within the range of acceptable even if in either case we envision booze fit only for bums.

In the end, we can say that an As was very likely, at least during the time of the Flavians, the denomination that would have been most useful at the market while a Denarius – a good day’s pay for a chunk of the workforce – certainly packed enough punch to put plenty of food on the table for a family’s meal. It also means that a careful budget placed the average Roman in a bit of a bind since the choice of eating well and having little left over for other expenses would mean uncomfortable sacrifices. And when it comes down to it, whether you’re supporting a family in the states on $90 a day (or $20 a day in South America) you’re not going to exactly live large either.