NEW BOOK: LOCAL COINAGES IN A ROMAN WORLD

Over the course of the second and first centuries BC, Rome conquered most of the Mediterranean world in a whirlwind of military campaigns. The lavish triumphal parades celebrated by Roman generals after their victories leave no doubt that Rome financially benefited from these victories and acquired an enormous quantity of bullion and foreign coinage on those occasions.

However, despite the unrivaled military power achieved in the course of the second and first centuries BC, one of the most surprising factors in the development of Roman domination of the Mediterranean world is that the Romans conquered and ruled most of it without imposing their own coinage on the conquered. In their pragmatic attitude to imperialism, the Romans typically retained any form of effective organization as they acquired new territories.

It is thus all the more important to research how local coinages converged—at least partly—to create compatible monetary systems across the Roman Empire. The Roman Provincial Coinage (RPC) series offers an incomparable tool for studying the coinages issued in the Roman provinces and client-kingdoms from the age of the civil wars onward. However, this series does not include the coinages issued in the Roman provinces in the second century and in the first half of the first century BC, when most of the Mediterranean regions came under Roman dominion or established commercial relationships with the Roman power.

Local Coinages in a Roman World. The Catalogue of the Richard B. Witschonke Collection of Coins in the Early Roman Provinces, now at the printer, represents a sort of RPC Zero, the historical and numismatic prologue to the study of Roman provincial coinage, as it addresses the coinage issued in the provinces of the Roman Empire in the second and first centuries BC.

The 3,726 coins included in this catalogue are all part of the Richard B. Witschonke Collection, acquired by the American Numismatic Society in 2015. Most of the specimens are of great historical and numismatic value, as argued in the historical introductions preceding each of the 36 sections of this catalogue. The 36 sections of the catalogue, encompassing the Mediterranean basin from West to East, adopt a progressive numbering comparable to the one adopted in RPC. The reason for adopting this progressive numbering is, again, the underlying idea that despite their diversity in media, types, and denominations, all the coinages included in the catalogue represent an answer to the shared need to operate in a world controlled by the Romans. Rather than providing only an overview of the monetary production in a specific area, each section is organized around a research question always related to changes brought in by Roman dominion to the monetary systems of the conquered areas.

While most of the sections are authored by Lucia Carbone, scholars of international acclaim contributed to specific sections, offering ground-breaking insights on previously understudied coinages. In Section 6, dedicated to Non-State Coinages of Central Italy, Clive Stannard offers a new chronological and typological organization for the complex materials encompassing imitative and special-purpose coinages issued in the region. In Section 9, Suzanne Frey-Kupper hugely revises the chronology for the Romano-Sicilian coinage, showing how Roman quaestores were signing these coinages in the early second century BC. Sophia Kremydi (Section 16) provides an updated overview of the coinage produced in Roman Macedonia right after the defeat of Perseus, the last of the Antigonids, in Pydna in 168 BC. Oliver Hoover (Sections 20, 30–36) addresses the coinages issued in Bithynia, Cappadocia, Cilicia, Syria, Coele Syria, Judaea, and Egypt and discusses the most updated bibliography on this subject. Moreover, Federico Carbone (Sections 7 and 13), Liv M. Yarrow (Section 4), and Oliver Hoover (Sections 28 and 29) wrote introductions for specific sections. Together with Lucia Carbone and Oliver Hoover, David Hendin contributed to the catalogue of the Decapolis, Idumaea, and Judaea (Section 35).

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