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.

Online Coins of the Roman Empire complete

OCRE (Online Coins of the Roman Empire) is a joint project of the American Numismatic Society (ANS) and the Institute for theStudy of the Ancient World at New York University. OCRE launched in July 2012 with the aim of creating a digital corpus of Roman imperial coins that could replace the old volumes of the RIC (Roman Imperial Coinage).

At the time of its launch, the catalog only included the coins minted from Augustus to Hadrian. At the end of 2012, it had already incorporated those minted until the reign of Antoninus Pius. Now, at the end of 2016, the catalog is complete and encompasses more than 500 years of Roman monetary history between Augustus and Zeno (31 BC - 491 AD).

The catalog offers a complete record of each issue. In many cases, it also includes images from coins in some of the most important numismatic collections in the world, such as those of the American Numismatic Society, the British Museum or the Münzkabinett in Berlin, among many others. More images will be incorporated in the future until all coin types are illustrated.

The great advantage of OCRE over the RIC volumes is that it allows users to search using a wide variety of criteria, such as issuing authority, mint, obverse and reverse legend, type, metal, denomination, place of discovery, etc.

One of the most useful features of OCRE is its mapstool, which allows you to locate coins from the mint in which they are minted, see the mints active in the reign of each emperor and much more. It also includes information on the place of discovery of some coins.

In short, OCRE is an indispensable assistant for both researchers and collectors of Roman imperial coinage.

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.

One of the most beautiful and mysterious coins of the ancient world

Aureus of Augustus,  photo of Joe Geranium

In 19 BC the monetalis M. Durmius struck one of the most interesting and captivating coins of those produced under the long reign of Emperor Augustus. It was an aureus, a gold coin of nearly 8 grams, the most valuable in the Roman monetary system, equivalent to 25 silver denarii. In the obverse, we see the face of a young Augustus with a crown of oak leaves and the legend CAESAR AUGUSTUS. Nothing surprising there. But the reverse features a stunning crab holding in its claws a graceful butterfly, accompanied by the legend M • III • VIR DVRMIVS designating the magistrate responsible for the minting, the monetalis Durmius. The interpretation of the reverse has been discussed by experts since the times of Joseph Eckhel (1737-1798).

Cassius’ denarius - Crawford 505 / 3

We find a similar representation of a crab in the reverse of a denarius of C. Cassius (one of the Caesar’ murderers), minted in 42 BC, probably in Sardis. The crab holds in its claws an aplustrum (a piece of ornament that was placed in the stern of ancient ships and a common symbol of naval power). Below the crab, we can recognize a diadem and a rose. In this case, however, there is a reliable interpretation of the motif. Cassius had just won a major naval victory against the Rhodian fleet and the crab represented the city of Kos, while the rose symbolized Rhodes. The historian Karl Galinsky sees in the aureus discussed here an example of Augustus’ ability to appropriate motifs used by his predecessors, but his argument is unconvincing. There are significant differences between the aureus of Augustus and this denarius and, at least to me, that makes direct imitation unlikely.

In a paper in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, W. Deonna proposed an astrological interpretation, seeing the crab as a representation of Cancer, the sign of the Zodiac, and an allusion to the concepts of happiness, prosperity, and worldly conquest, while the butterfly symbolizes the immortality of the soul. A complex and unconvincing interpretation.

Aureus of Augustus,  photo of Joe Geranium

Before the establishment of what might be called "scientific" numismatics by Eckel in the eighteenth century, it was common to interpret Roman coins allegorically. During this period, Durmius’ aureus was seen as a clear reference to the motto festina lente (make haste slowly), that according to Suetonius was one of Augustus’ favorites adages. This can be seen, for example in the emblem book Imprese Heroiche, by Gabriele Simeoni (1509-1575) where the coin and the phrase are expressly connected. In the absence of more convincing answers by modern experts, should we return to this interpretation?

Aes Rude and Aes Signatum – The Beginnings of Roman Coinage

Coinage came into use in Asia Minor around 600 BC. By 500 BC its use had spread through the Greek world. Compared with other civilizations of the Mediterranean world, coinage came late into use in the Roman Republic. The Romans remained a primitive and eminently rural people until the late fourth century BC. They used livestock (pecus) and crude bronze bars (aes rude) as media of exchange. Latin preserved the memory of this period in its word to designate money, pecunia (from pecus). A similar system was used by other peoples in Italy, because there were no deposits of silver and gold there. Only the Greek colonies of southern Italy issued coins of these precious metals following the common practice in their mother cities. They obtained, however, these metals through trade.

The Law of the Twelve Tables (Lex Duodecim tabularum) demonstrates the use in Rome of the bronze pound (as, plural asses) as a way of measuring the value of properties in the V century BC. The memory of this primitive system was preserved for a long time. All transactions with these rough bronze pieces involved the use of a scale. Many centuries after the introduction of coinage, a scale and a piece of bronze were still used as a symbol of the sale and the change of ownership in the ceremony of mancipatio, by which the transfer of certain types of goods, like land, for example, was officially confirmed.

In the late fourth century BC, silver coins were minted for Rome in Naples. Their origin and function are discussed by specialists. Their impact on the Roman economy was surely limited. Only at the beginning of the third century BC, Rome began to standardize the form of bronze bars by introducing the use of cast ingots. The purpose of this change was probably to achieve a more uniform set of weights and to facilitate trade. The new bars were marked with various motives, and this is why they are commonly known today as aes signatum.

 signatum aes (Crawford RRC 5 / 1)

The oldest bars had a motive only on one side, but the Romans began soon to decorate both major faces. The motives served, probably, as a certification of the characteristics of the piece. By covering also the entire length of the block, they allowed to recognize if it was intact or if a portion had been removed.

Of course, these bars cannot be considered as coins in the strict sense, because they were produced by pouring molten metal into molds. They met, however, a monetary function as means of exchange. It was common practice to split them when a piece of lesser value was needed.

signatum aes (Crawford RRC 9 / 1)

The motives of these ingots are not without a certain beauty, as seen in the examples that accompany this text. The two most elaborate are RRC 5 / 1 (Crawford) with a bull on each side and RRC 9 / 1 (Crawford) that presents both an elephant and a wild boar. These are usually related to a story told by Aelianus Tacticus, according to which the Romans used pigs to scare the elephants used against them in the Pyrrhic wars.

The Most Famous Ancient Coin and its History

Heritage will auction in September a silver denarius minted by Brutus to commemorate the assassination of Julius Caesar. Should it reach its pre-auction estimate of $500,000+, it will establish a record price. 

This denarius is rightly considered the most important Roman coin. It ranked first in the vote among some of the world's leading collectors, curators and numismatists organized by Harlan J. Berk  for his book 100 Greatest Ancient Coins.

 

The Assassination of Julius Caesar

On 15 March (date known in the Roman calendar as "Ides of March") 44 BC, a group of conspirators led by Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus assassinated Julius Caesar in an attempt to restore the Roman Republic. But the dictator's death could not change a political reality that had long become irreversible. The power vacuum caused by the death of Caesar was quickly followed by a civil war between those who wanted to take charge of his political inheritance and those who aspired to restore the power of the Senate. Brutus and Cassius were forced to leave Italy, retreating to the eastern provinces in search of support and resources to fight Mark Antony and Octavian, the leaders of the Caesarian party.

The EID MAR Denarius

Both Cassius and Brutus minted many different types of coins in the following two years, not only to pay their troops but also to make propaganda for their cause. In an age without mass media, in which a very small percentage of the population could read, coins were one of the most effective means to quickly spread a message. The most famous of the coins minted by Brutus is the silver denarius depicted above. It refers directly to the murder of Caesar in its reverse. The meaning of the daggers represented there is unmistakable, but it is still made clear by the legend EID • MAR, Ides of March, the date of the murder. The pileus, depicted among the daggers, was a hat worn by Roman slaves when they gained freedom. Here, it symbolizes the justification of Caesar’s assassination: the tyrant must die because this was necessary to free the roman people from bondage. 

The obverse of this coin depicts the bust of Brutus. This is in sharp contradiction to the message of political liberation in the reverse. The representation of living people on a coin was a recent development in Rome. In fact, it was a novelty introduced by Caesar, and it had clear autocratic associations. It was one of the reasons why he was accused of aiming at the monarchy.