seth.bernard@utoronto.ca
Despite a very long history of study, it is my contention that we have not arrived at a satisfactory answer to the question of why Romans first used coins sometime around 300 b.c.1 The evidence presents several difficulties, including an apparent lack of correspondence between archaeology and textual sources and a scarcity of fixed points in the chronology. However, my critique is more methodological. By and large, scholarship has long sought a specific fiscal expenditure behind Rome's initial production of coinage. As I hope to make clear, nothing of this sort matches the character of Roman coinage in its earliest stages. The problem has been noted before, with some going so far as to deny the start of Roman coinage much significance, preferring instead to view the appearance of coins as a sort of economic non-event.2 If we hold, as I think we should, that Romans’ initial use of coins marked a development of more than retrospective importance, then a new approach is needed.
One crucial, but under-appreciated, point is the extent to which the initial period of Roman coinage overlapped with radical transformations in Rome's society and economy. Recent syntheses of the mid-republican economy stress abundant change in the structure of land tenure and the scope of trade beginning around 300 b.c., but coins are not well integrated into this picture.3 Meanwhile, monetary history features little in accounts of the formation of the patricio-plebeian nobilitas or vice versa, even though Rome's political elite must ultimately have been responsible for deciding to produce coins. By overlooking the potential importance of such developments, scholarship tends in the Marxist sense to fetishise early Roman coins, approaching them in terms of their intrinsic character and utility, but with little regard for the social relationships for which they stand or the larger systems of value within which they operate.
This essay is therefore a deliberately wide-ranging attempt to understand Rome's first coins not as instrumental to any specific fiscal need, but rather as part of a shift in the way Romans constructed the relationship between wealth and political power. In other words, I suggest that the minting and use of coins in third-century Rome be understood as a social phenomenon.4 In...
