The decussis, the largest Roman coin ever issued

Decussis - AE 1075 gr. c. 215 b.C. obv: Head of Rome to the right with helmet. Value mark X. rev: Roman galley to the left. Mark of value X.

The Second Punic War and the crisis of the archaic Roman monetary system

The Second Punic War (218-201 BC) was a crucial event in Roman history. An all-or-nothing struggle for hegemony in the western Mediterranean between the two powers of the region, Carthage and the Roman Republic.

At the beginning of the war, Hannibal's bold crossing of the Alps and the brilliant victories in the battles of Ticino, Trebia and Lake Trasimeno gave the Carthaginians an important advantage and left the Romans in a critical situation. Hannibal always seemed one step ahead of the Roman generals. For the campaigning season of 216 BC, the senate decided to gather a much larger army than the ones Hannibal had defeated, trusting that the numerical superiority would allow the Roman commanders to neutralize his tactical talent. They sent 80.000 men to face the Carthaginians in a decisive Battle.

Despite these enormous efforts, the 216 B.C. campaign ended in complete disaster. The Battle of Cannae was the greatest defeat of the Romans in all their history. In spite of his numerical inferiority, Hannibal made with his troops a brilliant pincer movement. The Roman soldiers, attacked from all sides, were annihilated in an unprecedented massacre.

The defeat left the Republic in a desperate situation. The losses could not be replenished in the short term and there was no longer enough metal to continue minting Roman coins to the standards in force before the start of the war. The quadrigatii were devalued by reducing their silver content and the bronze coins by reducing their weight.

The decussis

The years following the defeat of Cannae were critical for Rome. Devaluations seem to have led to a gradual loss of confidence in Roman currency. The Roman authorities reacted minting new types of coins. A particularly interesting issue is that of a complete set of bronze denominations that the English numismatist Michael Crawford dates to the years 215-212 BC. and includes large-sized cast coins.

The decussis is particularly striking because it is, in fact, the largest coin ever issued by the Roman state in all its long history, with 1075 grams of weight. Dea Roma is depicted on the obverse, wearing a Phrygian helmet and with the mark of value X behind. On the revers, we see the typical galley of the Roman bronze coins. These large cast coins were only a short lived experiment and are extremely rare. Only four decussis are known today, three of which are in museums and only one in the hands of a private collector, having been auctioned in 2010 for 240,000 Swiss francs.

The First Roman Coin

Its military expansion during the fourth century BC transformed the Roman Republic into the greatest power on the Italian peninsula. The political, economic, and cultural contacts with the Greek cities of Campania and southern Italy became much more intense. Compared to these Greek cities, Rome was, despite its power, a backward and predominantly rural society, in which trade played a comparatively minor role. The production of coinage was much more advanced in the cities of Magna Graecia than in Rome, where rustic bronze bars were used instead of coins. 

The need to interact with these cities led Rome to instruct its allies to produce a series of coins with Greek characteristics for its own use. That is the usual interpretation offered by experts for a range of early Roman coins which represent a clear break with the roman tradition of cast ingots. On the chronology of these coins there are, however, very different views. The information available is insufficient to settle the issue definitively. Here I follow the conclusions of Michael Crawford (see Roman Republican Coinage).

The first of these coins (Crawford 1/1) -illustrated above- has fascinated scholars since the origins of numismatic studies. It is made of bronze. On the obverse we can see Apollo crowned with laurels and on the reverse the front of a bull with a human head accompanied by the Greek legend RWMAIWN (of the Romans). Due to its characteristics and style, this coin is usually associated with the coinage of Naples, and is believed to have been produced in the mint of that city at the request of Rome. It was probably coined shortly after the treaty (foedus aequum) that united Naples and Rome as allies at the beginning of the second Samnite war in 326 BC. A second piece of bronze with similar characteristics was coined in Rome around 300 BC. 

This coin is particularly interesting because it is a “fiat currency”. This means that, unlike what happened with the ingots commonly used in this period as currency in Rome, this coin had almost no real value, it weighed only four and a half grams. Its value came from the fact that the Roman state and its allies accepted it as a means of payment. 

In the third century BC Rome entrusted its allies in southern Italy with the minting of a series of coins with a distinctly Greek outlook: the Roman silver didrachms. I will discuss them in a following post.