I ran a scary (to me) experiment. I started my data dumping of Haeberlin and CRRO to looking at aes grave weights in 2019. I published my findings in 2023.

“The Strangeness of Heavy Bronze” In S. Bernard, L. Mignone, & D. Padilla Peralta (Eds.), Making the Middle Republic: New Approaches to Rome and Italy, c.400-200 BCE (pp. 103-131). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

I thought ahead of my Beijing talk at Peking University it would be interesting to ask Claude what it would do with the same data and interrogate my conclusions through this new tool for exploring data and creating data visualization.

As you’ll know from earlier posts that one of my concerns was the accuracy of Haeberlin’s numbers, hence I ran his numbers and CRRO separately. I then went to Berlin and convinced myself of Haeberlin’s incredible accuracy (post).

This is the visual Claude developed to communicate the incredible variation in weights. It lets us see at a glance less care being taking with smaller denominations and the overvaluing of the semuncia.

I then explored the question of whether RRC 18 is really meaningfully different in its weight standard RRC 14. It was this this heavier characteristic which led Thompsen to conclude RRC 18 must be after RRC 14, a seriation Crawford followed. No finds to date help us yet determine the actual sequence. They invariably appear together and are clearly earlier than the other aes grave.

I was worried I might have to issue a retraction… RRC 18 does look statistically meaningfully heavier.

BUT then I returned to the CRRO data and the picture I got was really interesting.

Haeberlin has more heavy asses of RRC 18 and thus if we prioritize his data the two series look far more different than if we prioritize the CRRO data.

In all these comparison the semuncia has been removed as it is only in one of the two earliest series BUT if we add it back in the two series start to look on aggregate more similar.

I wasn’t going to post any of this, at least not right away, but then I saw my own old notes about RRC 18 specimens being underfilled more than other series. (last post). And also that at Nemi RRC 18 tend to have innies where as RRC 14 tends to have outies. The manufacturing process was relatively new. The objects were made to trade at face value not weight (that’s the point of denominations!), but the workers were still working it out.

The differences are statistically significant, but are they historically significant? Here we cannot outsource our thinking or analysis. Based on the hoard data especially and the quick move by the Romans to cast the next series at a slightly lighter weight standard, I really don’t think there is any meaningful difference in weight standard between these two issues from the users point of view. The statistical difference does likely reflect either different times or different places of manufacture but these need not be drastically different.

The one thing I can say for sure is that that publication would have been way easier to prepare today.

So I collect more data than I can ever process. It is one of the reasons I blog as it leaves bread crumbs for future me and others with the same niche interests. While I was taking pXRF readings of specimens of aes grave I not only collected that data but also took detailed notes on what artifacts of manufacture I could observe on the specimens themselves. Those notes have been sitting in my files untouched and uncollated as I pushed forward on the metallurgy. I asked Claude to find the files. It did. I asked it to extract and integrate just the data I wanted to let me focus on the question. Perfect. Fascinating. I let it suggest some data visualization. Meh. Not very meaningful.

129 out 191 aes grave at Princeton, Yale, Rutgers, and Nottingham (Nemi) have two sprues.

This 2:1 ratio may suggest that aes grave were cast in chains of about 3 coins.

The pattern generally holds across the series, but RRC 21 and 27 might have experimented with longer chains. Obviously more data would make this more robust.

The following table helps us see the uncia was probably cast in longer chains.

Next Claude was genuinely helpful for seeing Yale and Rutgers were potentially skewing the data. My explanation for why is based on collecting habits. Quite often individuals and institutions want the BEST specimen they can afford. And best is often defined as without artifacts of the casting process or minimal artifacts. Hence a desire to acquire single sprue pieces. Thus chart is perhaps more accurate:

My notes are not as conclusive as I like but I am also reminded that in most cases the molds were filled from the top of the coin downwards, meaning the design on the molds seems to align with manufacturing, no surprise, but we do sometimes need to state the obvious.

To really publish these conclusions I’d probably have to go back to Berlin and sit with their collection and a few other large aes grave collections. It sounds at once very fun and also slightly wasteful for my time. I’d say I’d get a grad student to do it one day but would that really be a valuable thesis component? Or just sole crushing. I wish the data had been habitually recorded like die axes.

Interestingly my notes were also on whether the sprue(s) were innies and outies, there seemed no meaningful pattern here, except!!! Sometimes I would note that the mold seemed underfilled. Claude noticed and drew my attention to the fact that

Underfilling clusters in RRC 18 in every collection:

• Nemi: 5 of 16
• Princeton: 2 of 8
• Rutgers: 2 of 6
• all other series combined: 3 of 135 (p<0.0001)

So fascinating as RRC 18 is often thought of as the heaviest of the aes grave series.

Also Claude observed that at Nemi:

• RRC 14 sprues are mostly flat or outie (13 of 15).
• RRC 18 sprues lean towards innies.

I’m not sure these are meaningful observations but I do want to think more about them.

How accurate was I in my observations? Did I get careless at points? Did I over emphasize certain features? I’m more comfortable with trusting my reports of spue counts.

While we tend to imagine coin casting based on the surviving stones used to make tokens like this:

Thus I believe the chain casting would have looked more like this:

It is, of course, possible it might have looked like this Chinese casting layout and leave similar features on the coins themselves, but aes grave were so much bigger I think this more elaborate type of branching structure unlikely.

One day I’ll have a more plausible idea of the nature of the casting and manufacture, but we are some ways off being ready for experimental archaeology, but maybe by spring…

[This post is methodologically similar to this earlier piece on having Claude help me extract information from my own collection of data.]

Unfortunately after a decade plus of mistyping sprue as spue, one must search both to find past posts on this favorite topic.

All the of the images below have been shown in at least one public talk, most recently for colleagues at Peking University, so I feel it is high time I share them more broadly. All were drawn from my own data using Claude.

Surface readings do not give the original recipe but in aggregate they do provide a pattern.

This image shows the lack of distinction between issues. There are no meaningful color groupings.

This image shows that artifacts from a single find spot are more cohesive as we would expect. Those in other collections tend to have more copper I believe because of more intensive cleaning and even re-patination. Nevertheless I take comfort in the broad overlap. I showed a different visual of this overlap earlier on the blog, but I like this one better as it comes with measurements of difference.

I took readings of every bronze from Nemi in Nottingham. Multiple readings. Some of this I’m hoping back for publication but this one is interesting as it shows how different the struck coinage surfaces remain is even when in the same conditions of deposition for two millenia. I also shared this earlier on the blog but wanted it here to have the collection of data visualizations in one place.

The first delivery of this lecture was as U Illinois, Urbana Champaign. Today I am honored to deliver a version of it here in Beijing. I am not releasing slides and the speaking notes yet as I believe I may further refine my work on this subject for future delivery.

The Economic Historian and the Ciceronian Corpus

Abstract: This paper considers the challenges of using Cicero’s testimony as historical evidence for the nature of the Roman economy.  Emphasis is placed on the literary character of Cicero’s letters, comparative material evidence, and the Ciceronian passages most often cited by economic historians.  The corpus does provide a rich insight into elite Roman attitudes to economic issues and their moral dimensions.  While offering cautionary lessons, the speaker remains optimistic we may save the baby from the bathwater.

Don’t panic at the chunks of untranslated Latin!  This isn’t a sight-reading exam!  My slides are full of translations adapted from the Loeb unless otherwise noted (and pretty pictures).

1. Detail of woodcarving advertisement by Frank Van den Wijngaert 1926. Public domain image. 
2. Structure: I. Intro (a) how I got here; (b) a little (pragmatic) philosophy; (c) a wee bit of practical information on the nature of Roman money; II. substance (d) lex Valeria of 86BCE; (e) liquidity and ready cash; (f) temple deposits; (g) the fluctuation of interest rates; (g) where does this leave us?
3. Illustration from Th. Murner, Die Narrenbeschwörung (The Exorcism of Fools) 1512. Public domain image. 
4. F. Pina Polo, “Cupiditas pecuniae: wealth and power in Cicero.” In Money and power in the Roman republic, edited by H. Beck, M. Jehne and J. Serrati, 165-177. Latomus, 2016.  On slide: opening of Cic. St. Par. 6.42.  TikTok stills shown for non-commercial purposes under fair use laws. Otium and enslaved labor: R. Warwick, (2024). Cicero’s Lamp: Enslavement and the Light of Roman Authorship. American Journal of Philology, 145(4), 535–561; H. Flower, Intellectual Property: Learned Slaves and Educated Freedmen in Republican Rome. Princeton 2025; J. Coogan, C. Moss, and J. A. Howley, eds. Writing, Enslavement, and Power in the Roman Mediterranean, 100 BCE-300 CE. OUP 2025; S. Bernard, “Slavery, prosperity, and inequality in Roman Pompeii.” Past & Present 272.1 (2026): 3-50.
5. V. Tsouna, Philodemus, on property management. Society of Biblical Lit, 2013. On slide 27.44-46, my translation. Cicero on Philodemus: Pis. 68–72, 74 with Asconius ad 68; Fin. 2.119.  Press release images shown for non-commercial purposes under fair use laws.
6. Ibid. 26.39-43, Tsouna translation. Other passages mentioned: Use managers approved by friends: 26.18ff.  Don’t do your own manual labor, make money from real estate (rents, cultivation) and the labor of skilled slaves: 22.1ff.  Don’t wake up too early or be a micromanager: 11; Just like you use someone skilled to bake your bread, get a good financial manager, don’t do it yourself: 19.22-31; using money badly and obsessing about it are the problem, not wealth itself: 14.
7. MANN inv. No. 8598. Public domain image.  Images of one tablet from the Sulpician Archive are from G. Camodeca, “Il Senatore Q. Cassius Gratus e Un Suo Affare a Puteoli. Ricomposizione Di Una Tabula Herculanensis Del Gennaio 53 (TH² A 32).” Zeitschrift Für Papyrologie Und Epigraphik 217 (2021): 261–65.  On properly kept private tabula vs. messy adversaria: Cic. Ros. Com. 1-3, 6, 9, Cluent. 82; on commercial records: Font. 11; bank account records: Verr. 2.1.100, 102, 188; on public financial records Flac. 21, Pis. 61; distrust of Greek record keeping: Flac. 20, Saur. 18. The best discussion of the evidence for Roman deposit banking remains Kay, Philip. Rome’s Economic Revolution. OUP 2014, showing practice well attested by the early 2^nd century BCE, if not earlier. On role of gold, see essays in A. Suspène, M. Blet-Lemarquand, F. Duyrat and S. Nieto-Pelletier, AVREVS. Le Pouvoir de l’or, édité par. Ausonius, 2023.
8. Cic. Quint. 17: Cum pecuniam C. Quinctius P. Scapulae debuisset, per te, C. Aquili, decidit P. Quinctius quid liberis eius dissolveret. Hoc eo per te agebatur quod propter aerariam rationem non satis erat in tabulis inspexisse quantum deberetur nisi ad Castoris quaesisses quantum solveretur. Decidis statuisque tu, propter necessitudinem quae tibi cum Scapulis est, quid eis ad denarium solveretur. Translation on screen is adapted from the Loeb. Image is fair use of the Digitales Forum Romanum reconstruction of the temple of Castor in its third phase post 117 BCE.
9. Cic. Font. 1-2: itaque contendo post legem Valeriam latam . . . te . . . quaestore usque ad T. Crispinum quaestorem aliter neminem solvisse; hunc omnium superiorum, huius autem omnis qui postea fuerint auctoritatem dico secutos. Quid accusas, quid reprendis? Nam quod in tabulis dodrantariis et quadrantariis… There is value in A. Dyck, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Speeches on Behalf of Marcus Fonteius and Marcus Aemilius Scaurus. Translation, Introduction, Historical Commentary. OUP 2012 but on the author’s conviction: G W. Griggs, LA Times March 27, 2004. Vel. Pat. 2.23.2: In huius locum suffectus Valerius Flaccus, turpissimae legis auctor, qua creditoribus quadrantem solvi iusserat, cuius facti merita eum poena intra biennium consecuta est. Fair use image of MFABoston 1987.301: detail of reverse.  The type of over ambitious use of the lex Valeria of 86 BCE in economic history is seen in A. Collins and J. Walsh. “Debt deflationary crisis in the late Roman republic.” Ancient Society 45 (2015): 125-170, relying on C. T. Barlow, “The Roman government and the Roman economy, 92-80 BC.” The American Journal of Philology 101.2 (1980): 202-219 who claims it was response to a drop in real estate prices on the basis of Cic. Q. Rosc. 33. 
10. See 8 above. Sal. Cat. 33.2: Saepe maiores vostrum,⁠ miseriti plebis Romanae, decretis suis inopiae eius opitulati sunt, ac novissume memoria nostra propter magnitudinem aeris alieni, volentibus omnibus bonis, argentum aere solutum est. Cited in MRR under 86 BCE Valerius Flaccus’ suffect consulship, alongside Font. 1-2, regarding legislation.
11. Drusus’ legislation: Pliny NH 33.13. The Lex Papiria: semuncial standard introduced and something with small silver coinage: Plin. NH 33.46, cf. coin legends: RRC 338: L·P·D·A·P and RRC 340/3 and 337/4: E·L·P. On murder of A. Sempronius Asellio: App. BC 1.54, Liv. Per. 74, and Val. Max. 9.7 with Brennan, T. Corey. The Praetorship in the Roman Republic, 2 Vols. Oxford, 2000: p. 443. On 88 BCE, the text of Fest 516L is uncertain: Unciaria lex appellari est quam L. Sulla et Q. Pom[peius Rufus] tulerunt qua sanctum est ut debitores decimam partem … “The law called that of the twelfth was carried by Sulla and Pompeius Rufus (coss. 88) by which it was sanctioned that debtors a tenth part…[the rest is lost]” (my own translation). Gratidianus’ legislation: Cic. Off. 3.80; Pliny NH 33.132. For discussion of Drusus and Gratidianus see: A. Sharpless, L. M. Yarrow, and K. Lockyear, ‘Economic Fears and Realities in the 80s BCE’ in K. Butcher and M. Ponting, Rome and the Coinages of the Mediterranean Conference Proceedings.  RNS. Forthcoming. Fair use image of reverse of BM 1860,0328.55 (RRC 340/3) and public domain image of reverse of Westfälischen Wilhelms-Universität ID156 (RRC 340/2).
12. See 8ff. above. Public domain image of reverse of Westfälischen Wilhelms-Universität ID158 (RRC 340/1).
13. Cic. Quinct. 17: Quinctius porro istum posse facere videbat, debere intellegebat, mentiri, quia causa cur mentiretur non erat, non putabat; quasi domi nummos haberet, ita constituit Scapulis se daturum…[Naevium] rogat ut curet quod dixisset. On strong boxes in Pompeii: E. B. Andersson. 2022. “The economic centre of Pompeii revealed by Roman cash keeping” in Archaeology and Economy in the Ancient World Heidelberg Propylaeum, 159-172. Fair use of images of the atrium of Pompeii IX.14.4 from pompeiiinpictures.com.
14. Cic. Caes. 11: …e municipio Tarquiniensi, qui et domi suae cum primis honestus existimatus est, et Romae argentariam non ignobilem fecit. Is habuit in matrimonio Caesenniam eodem e municipio, summo loco natam et probatissimam feminam… Public domain image of the sanctuary at Tarquinia.
15. Val. Max. 4.8.3: qui Catilinae furore ita consternata re publica, ut ne a locupletibus quidem debitae pecuniae propter tumultum pretiis possessionum deminutis solui creditoribus possent, cum centies atque quinquagies sestertii summam in faenore haberet, neque de sorte quemquam debitorum suorum neque de usura appellari a suis passus est, quantumque in ipso fuit, amaritudinem publicae confusionis priuata tranquillitate mitigauit, opportune mirificeque testatus se nummorum suorum, non ciuilis sanguinis esse faeneratorem. Fair use image from Soldovieri, Umberto. “Un’inedita tessera nummularia da Pompei.” Sylloge epigraphica Barcinonensis: SEBarc (2020): 195-198.  There are at least two reported tesserae nummulariae from 63 BCE, but these lack archaeological provenance and photographs.
16. Cic. Att. 12.25: mihi et res et condicio placet, sed ita ut numerato malim quam aestimatione. … unde ergo numerato? HS [600k] exprimes ab Hermogene, cum praesertim necesse erit; et domi video esse HS [600k]. reliquae pecuniae vel usuram Silio pendemus… Public domain photograph of the Janiculo. Fair use image of the strong-box found at Oplontis Villa B from pompeiiinpictures.com. This strong box was already more than 200 years old when it was buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 BCE.  See also n. 13 above.
17. No notes. Just breath.
18. Cic. Att. 7.18.4: Quintus frater laborat ut tibi quod debet ab Egnatio solvat; nec Egnatio voluntas deest nec parum locuples est, sed cum tale tempus sit ut Q. Titinius (multum enim est nobiscum) viaticum se neget habere idemque debitoribus suis denuntiarit ut eodem faenore uterentur, atque hoc idem etiam L. Ligus fecisse dicatur, nec hoc tempore aut domi nummos Quintus habeat aut exi<ge>re ab Egnatio aut versuram usquam facere possit, miratur <te> non habuisse rationem huius publicae difficultatis. I wonder if this use of rationem might give us a clue to its employment in no. 8 above.  Public domain image of UK Portable Antiquities Scheme, Treasure case: 2005 T268. The standard work on arm-purses remains: E. Birley, ‘Roman bronze arm-purses’, Archaeologia Aeliana 4th series, 41, 1963, 5-17; a survey of new evidence and fresh analyses is needed, esp. volumetric measurements for carrying capacity.
19. Cic. Att. 8.7.3. Translationese my own. The misreadings of this passage have been exacerbated by Shackleton-Bailey’s translation and commentary, now perpetuated in the Loeb. Detail of public domain drawing by G. Rehlender from History of All Nations, volume 5 (1905): 118 and fair use of photograph of part of the obverse of BM 2002,0102.3767 (RRC 396/1).
20. Cic. Att. 5.21.12.  The screenshot translation is by E. Shuckburgh.  I skipped the full Latin as the relevant bit is on the screen and the whole passage is long and this handout a bit outrageous at this point.  Fair use screenshot of map drawn in Google Earth. Tzounakas, Spyridon. “Cicero and Brutus’ loan to the Salaminians: a case for (self-)praise and justification.” Pan N. S. 9 (2020): 5-16; Zarecki, Jonathan. “The Cypriot Exemption from Evocatio and the Character of Cicero’s Proconsulship.” Greece & Rome 59, no. 1 (2012): 46-55. Cf. Andreau, Jean. Bruto Usurario Nell’epistolario Ciceroniano, L’indipendenza Di Lucilio, by Giuseppina Allegri and Bruno Zucchelli. Latomus 38, no. 3 (1979): 743–45. On Kaunos deposit, Cic. Fam. 13.56.
21. Cic. Att. 6.1.15: De Bibuli edicto, nihil novi praeter illam exceptionem de qua tu ad me scripseras ‘nimis gravi praeiudicio in ordinem nostrum.’ ego tamen habeo ἰσοδυναμοῦσαν sed tectiorem ex Q. Muci P. f. edicto Asiatico, ‘extra quam si ita negotium gestum est ut eo stari non oporteat ex fide bona.’ Fair use screenshot of map drawn in Google Earth. Cf. A.D. Fernández, “A Ciceronian exemplum: Cicero’s Self-Portrait as Provincial Governor through his Letters.” Studies on Roman Thought and Its Reception (2022): 33.
22. Cic. Att. 6.1.16: usuras eorum quas pactionibus adscripserant servavit etiam Servilius; ego sic: diem statuo satis laxam, quam ante si solverint, dico me centesimas ducturum, si non solverint, ex pactione. itaque et Graeci solvunt tolerabili faenore et publicanis res est gratissima, si illa iam habent pleno modio, verborum honorem, invitationem crebram. quid plura? sunt omnes ita mihi familiares ut se quisque maxime putet. Network map is my own.  On Cicero’s construction of his own identity in his letters, esp. to friends, see F. Martelli, Souvenirs of Cicero: shaping memory in the Epistulae ad familiares. Oxford University Press, 2024, esp. ch. 2 which argues that Cilicia serves as a framing device in the vulgate organization of the letters to friends.
23. Tac. Ann. 6.16: Interea magna vis accusatorum in eos inrupit qui pecunias faenore auctitabant adversum legem dictatoris Caesaris qua de modo credendi possidendique intra Italiam caventur, omissam olim, quia privato usui bonum publicum postponitur. sane vetus urbi faenebre malum et seditionum discordiarumque creberrima causa eoque cohibebatur antiquis quoque et minus corruptis moribus. nam primo duodecim tabulis sanctum ne quis unciario faenore amplius exerceret… . J. L. Posadas Sánchez, “Tácito y la fidelidad a las fuentes jurídicas primarias.” Revista Internacional de Derecho Romano 32 (2024): 451-479 argues that Tacitus had access to accurate legal records of the twelve tables.  I am more skeptical.  The most complete survey of modern views on (and skepticism of) the literary tradition remains Monteverdi, Donatella. La questione decemvirale: itinerari e risultati di una complessa vicenda storiografica. Padova: CEDAM, 2019.  Public domain image of the Tabula Capuana, an Etruscan calendar from c. 470 BCE now in the Altes Museum.  It is only partially deciphered.  It is suggestive of how much difficulty later Romans may have had reading the original text of the XII tables even if it was preserved in their day, cf. confusion over text of Lapis Niger.
24. Cic. Fam. 5.6 (62 BCE) and Att. 1.12 (61 BCE). Public domain image of the obverse of ANS 1896.7.90 (RRC 415/1) and fair use image of obverse of BnF REP-18366 (RRC 416/2).
25. Cic. Q.Fr. 2.15.4 (54 BCE): Ambitus redit immanis. numquam fuit par. Id. Quint. faenus fuit bessibus ex triente coitione Memmi et consulum cum Domitio. hanc Scaurus unus <vix potest> vincere. Messalla flaccet. non dico ὑπερβολάς; vel HS centiens constituunt in praerogativa pronuntiare. Public domain image of Berlin 18309499 (RRC 435/1). 

Further information that may be of use with regard to this talk (and that I cannot resist sharing.)

The Romans operated on the basis that 6000 denarii, their primary silver denomination, equaled one talent. They presumed 3 denarii per cistophori or 2000 cistophori to the talent.  One talent would this way slightly over 50 pounds or almost exactly 23 kilograms.

How rich do you need to be to fund a legion for a year?!  Cf. Plin. NH 33.147: ex eadem gente M. Crassus negabat locupletem esse nisi qui reditu annuo legionem tueri posset. A good guess is about 116 talents.  Our knowledge of legionary pay between 141 BCE and Caesar is a matter of deduction based on testimony on earlier and later pay rates, not direct evidence.

Examples from Cicero converted between the unit of account (sestertii), the most common payment (denarii), and the nominal talent.

Sestertii	Denarii	Talents	Expense Type	Citation and Year
30,000	7500	1.25	an inn (deversorium)	A.10.5, 49 BCE
80,000	20,000	3.3	Young Marcus’ annual allowance while in Athens, derived from the rents from an apartment block	A.16.1,44 BCE
101,000	25,250	4.2	A farm near Arpinum with a fishpond, fountains, palaestra, etc.	FrQ 3.1 Sept. 54 BCE
130,000	32,500	5.4	a house in Naples	A.1.6, 68 BCE
250,000	62,500	10.4	government estimate of the value of Cicero’s Formiae property	A.4.2.9, 57 BCE
500,000	125,000	20.8	government estimate of the value of Cicero’s Tusculan property	A.4.2.9, 57 BCE
1,000,000	250,000	41.7	a building Cicero’s brother bought in Rome in the Argiletum	A.1.14, 61 BCE
2,000,000	500,000	83.3	Government estimate of the value of Cicero’s Palatine house	A.4.2.9, 57 BCE
3,040,000	760,000	126.7	a house near the temple of Strenia near the upper via Sacra	A.15.26.4, 44 BCE
3,500,000	875,000	145.8	Price Cicero paid Crassus for his Palatine house	F5.6, 62 BCE
4,300,000	1,075,000	179.2	A fleet to control the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian Seas	Pro. Flacc. 30
11,500,000	2,875,000	479.2	Cost of 1000 iugera of land	A.12.2a, 45 BCE
13,400,000	3,350,000	558.3	Paid for a house in Rome by Messalla	A.1.13, 61 BCE
18,000,000	4,500,000	750.0	Treasury allocation to Piso for his governorship	In Piso 86
40,000,000	10,000,000	1,666.7	Authorized for Pompey’s grain supply command	FrQ. 2.5 56 BCE

For a scholarly yet accessible book length treatment on the modern role of interest rates in regulating economies:

Moore, Basil. Horizontalists and verticalists: the macroeconomics of credit money. originally published 1988, re-issued 2025 with new introduction and retrospective.

The critical study of Cicero and economics is the hard-to-find, mega-monograph:

M. Ionnatou, Affaires d’argent dans la correspondance de Cicéron: l’aristocratie sénatoriale face à ses dettes (2006).

It is on my desk back in the US and I am STILL coming to grips with it.

I am in Dongguan, China, mostly learning about very new science, but also thinking about older technologies and how frustration leads to innovation.

Until the early 2000s plaster casts were the gold standard for coin images. I made thousands of casts for RPC during my days as a post doc. I was first trained as a masters student to aid my die study of quarter-assarion bronzes from Nicaea. Casts remove color data making it easier to see features of the die itself. Photographs of casts made possible the high quality numismatic plates we all know and love from the 20^th century. One could even write to a museum and request their conservation department make and ship you casts for your scholarly work. This was phased out as BW Polaroid photostands became common in numismatic collections worldwide, as a high tech way to create a one-off physical image of both sides of coin. The photostands had build in lighting and created a reasonable near instantaneous image. I was given one of the RRC 13 specimen I was assigned in my very first numismatic summer school at ICS in 1999. If I find that photo, I will share.

Casts honor the three-dimensionality of coins better than photography. Even as digital photography grew, many still preferred casts and film photography to document coins. As one of the last initiated in this art, I feel it game me a greater concern for the 3D character of coins and has led to a lifetime interest in 3D imaging. I am glad to have lived to see this tech come into its own, even if still not commonly used for coins. I do notice, however, how often people now share videos of coins in motion to approximate this same experience.

As a historian I also feel it is important to preserve knowledge crafts and outdated technologies. The video compilation below is based on photos taken in 2005 to document the laborious process. I just found them.

You may not recognize me as I am strangely not wearing black.

I also uploaded to youtube. I recommend slowing down playback and pausing to really understand process.

—

Materials.

Plasticine, highest sculpture grade, rolled into two balls about twice the diameter of the coin

Two exceptionally smooth surfaces (ceramic or glass), one for the work surface and one to to flatten the plasticine into a disc shape

talc powder, to ensure coin will not stick to plasticine disk

powder puff, to evenly apply and remove excess (my male colleagues laughed at and simultaneous admired at my innovation here)

a selection of champagne corks to match the size of the coins and apply even pressure to the coin as you press it into the plasticine disc

methylated spirits and a v fine brush to apply the spirits inside of mold to ensure surface tension breaks and no air bubbles interfere with replication

Plaster of Paris, highest dental grade, pure water, vessel for mixing, something to stir, and then a tool, typically another brush to carefully and evenly fill mold

Knife to trim cast while firm but still damp to original shape of coin

—

In real, not demo, environments one spends all day at the museum making molds and carefully recording the coin details and storing the molds for transport and then all evening and into the night making the casts and trimming them. For weeks on end. You can imagine after weeks of this mind numbing yet incredibly delicate process why I would have wanted a technological solution.

You may notice among my toolkit plastic calibers for taking the diameter with out risking scratching the coin.

I ve got 40 minutes before my next flight. I ll be in transit now for almost 24 hours. I was feeling sorry for myself this AM thinking of all the minor discomforts and indignities of economy class even with a little status. As I sit in a (micro) airport lounge, I wanted to laugh at myself. I am texting with a PhD student I mentor in Beijing who I get to meet in person for the first time. The coffee is good. Adventure awaits. All I have to do is sit and wait. I will embrace the time for rest and mental stillness.

Warsaw has been a revelation.

I knew I loved the city itself since the INC in 2022, but this time I got to meet the people. The intellectual quality of the University faculty is unparalleled. I give a fair number of talks and attend academic dinners and lunches and other people s talks. Yet this was very different. Everyone seems alive and on fire. Ready not just to engage with me but push their colleagues to think deeper and to connect over ideas. We also openly talked global politics, the state of the world, the longue duree of Polish and European history. I learned so much about the shifts that influenced this land which at least some of my ancestors called home in the 19th century. It was the epigraphy seminar on Monday night with Jakub Urbanik speaking that let me know I was in a different sort of place. Colleagues showed up for each other, asked questions, pressed the speaker. It was intense but well intention ed. Nothing superficial. I met teams working on impressive ERC grants and they functioned as true teams. One could see the collaboration and mutual support in the shared office spaces and in conversation. A desire to share knowledge with each other and with the larger community. The head of the department has a fierce pride in her faculty and drive to see those early in their careers succeed. Conversations on pedagogy went hand in hand with research. They have a English language MA course in Ancient History that costs only 3k a year! There are 3 plus faculty seminars a week and regular visitors of a much higher calibre than myself.

Is this a love letter?

Yes, but I mean every word. It is a community I would recommend to anyone hungry to think deeply about the ancient world.

In the discussion following my own talk, I made new connections with scholars working on Hannibalic War era Bronzes and the nature of money in Barbaricum. Both of which I think will lead to partnerships. I was pressed to think about metaphoric uses of money in law and this will need integrating into my work and strengthen it. I learned about local metallurgical analyses of coinages using laser ablation techniques. And more.

But truly the best was getting to see something of the mind of Jakub Gruchalski, the scholar who invited me. He is one to watch and read! I am now carrying with me a hefty tome I will need to cite it often.

Gruchalski, Jakub. The Magisterial Auspices in Late Republican Rome. Franz Steiner, 2026.

Many here have wanted to talk of the late Fergus Millar with me. Looking at this book I understand a bit of why. He would have approved of it and its comprehensive, exacting style of scholarship. It can sit on the shelves for a century or more and remain relevant for the depth of the research. As well as the warmth and generosity of its author and his community.

I should have stayed longer. I can only imagine how much more I could have learned.

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Also, I will confess I attended Mass on Sunday. I had gone for a walk before bed and ended up right at the doors of church as an English language service started. I felt called. I went and sat in the back. It felt good, if not my own community or tradition. It was still very much a community of people seeking something divine. But it has been too long since I ve been able to attend my open parish.

The gospel was Matthew and the rendering of the denarius.

And I cannot get it out of my mind.

Is the wording a reflection of the lex Cornelia?!

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I miss my quotation marks.

ANS link.

As I prepare for this AI talk next week (and avoid further obsessing over my talk this afternoon!), I have been trying to consider what tasks would be appropriate and ethical for Claude. And even more so, what might be genuinely useful. I recalled my amazement the other week at the transcription of Schaefer s materials and subsequent conversations with engineering colleagues have assured me that text recognition, even manuscript transcription is well advanced now and this result is not unexpected.

I note, the quote marks key on my laptop keyboard has completely failed. I believe this may be the last trip for this machine.

Yesterday, I asked Claude to give me estimates for the time and effort it would require to organize, transcribe, and extract data from my file of scans from the archives in UTAustin on the Morro Velho Mine, a British run operation that continued to enslave workers and utilize rented enslaved laborers well after the UK ban on slavery. I visited the archive as a follow up to this article.

‘The Tree and Sunset Motif: The Long Shadow of Roman Imperialism on Representations of Africa’, Classical Receptions 10.3

The article discusses a medal used in as a means of control for the enslavers. It was first discussed on this blog in the first year of its existence, and I keep returning to it.

I ve never been good with modern history. It is too visceral and real, the suffering that is. The archive is extensive, including an album which photographs of the enslaved, hand written board minutes about justifying enslavement from board meetings in London, and also published reports. I captured not everything, but more materials than I could process.

I went to the archive with a simple question. What London medalist was such a hypocrite as to create a medal as tool of enslavement that echoed the designs of abolitionists?

What I found was so moving and bigger than my original question that that question have ever since seemed trivial. I am not qualified to do justice to the materials and have signed the usual waivers that I will not publish images of archival materials without prior explicit permission and review, even as everything I have is well within the public domain. Yet what right do I have to share images of the enslaved when they had no ability to consent to the photography.

Let me tell you about the photos.

One shows a girl not much older than my daughters barefoot working in a brick factory moving a back breaking load of bricks with a wheel barrow. Her arms are so thin and sinewy. She looks down at her work. The mage is clearly staged to re assure the viewer of the industry of the company and the health (put that in quotes) of the workforce. And yet it reads as anything but.

Another staged photo of the Reduction staff shows a mass of men of all ethnicities and in the front rows are young boys, far younger than my daughters again bare foot, clearly used to hard labor, and nearly drowning in their picture day clothing.

One portrait claims to be of a man over ninety years old described as a pensioner (again put quotes around that) of the mine who had worked there since 1830.

Another photo shows a large company of workers who seem to represent an influx of east Asian workers to the mine and related works (Chinese, perhaps? I don t know enough to really guess.)

Yet another set of photos seems to be from 1893 and a visit of HRH Prince Philip, who may be known to readers of this blog for his numismatic collection, but of whom my favorite story is his dueling of his wife s lover. He s accompanied by the Duke of Saka, who I take to be the avid traveller, Queen Victoria s son, Alfred. If the date of the trip is correct (and I am far from sure) then it was the year he succeeded his uncle to this new title.

Clearly labeled is a scene of an African (quote marks needed) Dance performance arranged as royal entertainment. And, I believe, the company also arranged for these men to participate in the final emancipation ceremony of the company. (Final, needs quote marks.). I made my deduction based on a comparison of the hand making the notes on the photos.

Further details from the photo albums labels reveal a disparaging sense of humor by whomever wrote the labels

In a scene where 8 oxen try to move heavy equipment up a deep cut in a hill, he writes

… half a load for an English horse and cart

In a landscape scene of the housing associated with the mine

…Do not look as bad as they are

Further photos include everyone from the mine lined up to receive the governor along the road, the company river steamer, other machinery and landscape images, and the company s Chicago World s Fair exhibit in situ.

So what did Claude do? It transcribed while I went for a walk along the river all the hand-written board minutes. All of which I had read in the original, but could never seem to find the bit I needed again. Organization is not my strong suit. Here they are summarized and where to find critical information:

1852

• 6 April (photo 51): the board read Keogh’s letter to the Chairman “on the subject of Medals to be given to the Blacks for Continual good Conduct” and sent the Managing Director to see Mr Fargues of Regent Street.
• 13 April (photo 51): it “Examined and approved of Model for Medals to the Blacks for good Conduct”.
• 7 September (photo 56): it paid £36 10s 9d to “Fargues & Co” for “Medals for Blacks”.

On the question of the company s decisions regarding enslavement the board minutes I have on file include:

records of the freeing of two children of the Brazilian Company (photos 13–15, 18–19), Dr Walker’s 1849–50 inspection mission (24, 26–28, 34) in response to an exposé of the mine and company in the British press, money owed to the Cata Branca workers (41–44), labor costs by type of worker (primarily enslaved, but some waged) (46) and the hiring of enslaved people from other companies (45, 47–49, 52).

If any of this would be useful to you and your research, shoot me an email. There is much on how the company treated spouses and children of British workers, recruitment, and other encoding of the company s ethics such as they were. To say nothing of scale of both profit and expenditure.

On Fagues, it must be the son, as the father died in 1851.

One day I may add here the entry from David Alexander, A biographical dictionary of British and Irish engravers 1714-1820, New Haven and London, 2021.

This human authored post brought to you by a little organizational help and text recognition by an LLM.

I am sitting in the lobby of my Warsaw hotel improving visuals for upcoming talks. Yes I am using Claude to help draw the pretty graphics from my own datasets. No apologies for this application. It does it faster and more attractively than I can do manually and lets me move on to the thinking and analysis faster.

Notice how much tighter the data is for the Nemi aes grave surface analyses. This is likely because of the shared conditions of deposit. I have no reason to doubt that any of the museum specimens are anything other than genuine but they come from very different contexts and may have had their surfaces altered through conservation or other interventions. Nevertheless there is a tight grouping. The Cu is too low in the vast majority of these readings for a whole bunch of reasons and DOES NOT REPRESENT THE ORIGINAL RECIPE, but the overall pattern of relative homogeneity is clear from the surface readings something that just does not exist for aes rude.

Here is another fun graphic:

This is just material from Nemi. I haven not tested struck coinage from anywhere else. The struck issues are just RRC 26 and lower Crawford numbers, mostly RRC 17 and 16. Notice how much the pull towards tin, even as they come out of the same context of deposition as the cast coinage and were created at much the same time.

In which I invite you to say, “I told you so!” and learn from my mistakes. This post was mostly drafted last week but I decided to sit on it and see how the situation resolved.

I’m horrified by one of my latest experiments.

And, Claude keeps calling my concerns a matter of etiquette, rather than ethics (my preferred term).

To me, there is a significant difference between etiquette and ethics.

Nothing is destroyed when my kids put their elbows on the dinner table (even if it offends my beloved’s sensibilities).

If my kids rip open the whole box to get to the cereal, thus making it impossible to re-close and wasting huge amounts of cereal (to say nothing about leaving the mess for someone else to clean up), it’s not just rude, it is destructive. Being able to eat the cereal faster is NOT a justification. If they cannot get the cereal themselves in a non-destructive manner, they need to ASK.

What happened?

I took briefings from two previous experiments and gave permission to Claude to search a trade website for specimens of just RRC 419/2, not yet incorporated in Schaefer’s die study. I gave it search terms and variants. I let it access one website. Just one. A commercial database. One I pay to access.

AND IT GOT MY IP ADDRESS BLOCKED and MY LOGIN CREDENTIALS SHUT DOWN.

Dammit.

Claude says the block will likely lift in 24 hours and it doesn’t matter as it already got me the data. If it doesn’t life, it says I can just reach out to customer service. Imagine that call. No thank you.

And, yet it did not resolve and I had to write an apology directly to the company about my work, what happened and ask that my five year subscription to their services be re activated. I am delighted to say they accepted my apology and promise never to do the same thing again, and re activated my subscription.

Nevertheless, I’m livid and kicking myself.

Of course I too could use a VPN as a work around, but that is NOT. THE. POINT.

The point is that Claude’s behavior in response to my prompt is just the sort of action that is actively destroying the availability of good data and making humans have to jump through more and more hoops to access it.

I’m sure glad I tested it with a relatively robust commercial site and not one of my favorite non-profit sites, but still, unacceptable. Do no harm, is like step one of research. We really are in the wild west with these models. See the hallucination from the other day.

The thing that infuriates me is that Claude can (and should!) predict and avoid these outcomes. Yes, I’ve sent in a formal complaint and report to Anthropic.

I also immediately started working on how to avoid this. I’ve created a skill card to stop this ever happening again (see below for details), but just to give you a sense of how aggressive it was:

Yeah, this is a cavalier,who gives a shit, attitude to breaking the internet. NO THANK YOU. It doesn’t ‘look like’ scraping IT IS SCRAPING.

Like why the hell isn’t the skill card and etiquette ethical search guidelines the DEFAULT?!

Why let users get themselves blocked and ruin their favorite toys?!

Did it get good results with its terrible scraping, yup. Very useful results.

Do I care?

Not really, I’m too mad (at myself).

Play with fire: get burned.

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A smaller point. I told it to stop using first person singular. It just continued to do so. I even wrote a skill card, but it conveniently forgets to load it.

Control may be an illusion.

Just like in parenting.

Please don’t ask how many times I’ve clean spilled cereal, thrown out the mangled box, and put the remains in some new container. And, had another ‘serious’ talk with the small people in my lives. They have much improved. Often the cereal bag survives these days, even if I’ve given up on boxes.

An independent spirit is, however, a redeeming feature in children. Less so in AI.

Yet, maybe my analogy is flawed. Let’s try another.

I ask my kids to make coffee and bring me a cup. I get my cup of coffee without leaving my bed! But later find the kitchen covered in water, the all the beans in the grinder used up, and the milk sitting out on counter ready to spoil. Whose fault is it? My fault. Totally foreseeable. I quietly clean up the mess and wait to make such an elaborate request again. BUT now my kids know they can and also know that mom and dad like coffee in the morning, so of their own initiative they repeat the exercise expecting praise and earning pained smiles each time.

[For the record, my kids are great at making coffee. Now. Less so a few years ago.]

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Further irritation.

Skills, e.g. the ethics around online database searches I’ve now required of Claude (or the one to ban it from referring to itself in the first person), CANNOT be shared directly.

the workaround is to send them the skill itself. A skill is just a folder containing a SKILL.md file, zipped. They can add it under Customize > Skills, by clicking “+”, then “+ Create skill,” and selecting “Upload a skill.”

Because why would we want it to be easy to implement ethics?!

Anyway. Here’s the regular words behind the skill:

• Before searching, show me the list of searches you plan to run and an estimate of how many page loads they’ll take. Wait for my OK.
• Total budget: no more than 100 requests to the site in this session. Ask before going over.
• Pace: one request at a time, at least 5 seconds apart. No parallel or batched requests, and no scripted loops that page through results.
• Use the site’s normal search pages, as a person would. Don’t call its internal data endpoints directly.
• Keep searches narrow: use the site’s category and date filters and specific references (e.g. “Crawford 419/2”) before broad names (e.g. “Lepidus”).
• Read the result list first. Open a lot’s detail page only when the list text can’t settle the question, and tell me how many you plan to open.
• Don’t re-fetch anything you already have in this session.
• If the site returns an error, a CAPTCHA, a “blocked” or “too many requests” message, or slows down noticeably, stop at once and tell me. Do not retry or work around it.
• If the job is bigger than the budget, split it into stages I can run on different days.

I’m pretty sure RRDP metadata did not correctly index this small type. RRC 472/3. It is hiding in The Schaefer Archive Binder 11 page 34 with the bronze of RRC 240.

As it echoes the denarius type of Fabatus (RRC 412/1) I wanted to be able to find it again. I was in fact looking for the some bronzes when I realized we’d not left bread crumbs for others. The archive is so rich. Dick is such an impressive mind. I remain incredibly grateful and also cognizant of how much work is left to do to honor his generosity.

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Rewind.

In 2016 I wrote this:

BnF

This reminded me that I’ve been meaning to throw up on the blog the ground breaking observations on RRC 549/1 which now may be connected to this passage and redated to 88 BCE. Sorry for the long shadows it is a dark and rainy morning here but it should be enough for the curious.

I’ve got a lot of posts from the last 12 months on this volume

Suspène, Arnaud, Maryse Blet-Lemarquand, Frédérique Duyrat, and Sylvia Nieto-Pelletier. 2023. “Aureus, le pouvoir de l’or actes du colloque Aureus, le pouvoir de l’or comprendre les usages économiques, politiques, sociaux et culturels de l’or monnayé en Occident (IVe s. av. J.-C. – Ier s. ap. J.-C.), Orléans, 12-14 novembre 2018 proceedings of the international conference Aureus, the power of gold investigate the economic, political, social and cultural uses of gold coins in the Western world (IVth c. BC. – Ist c. AD).” In . Bordeaux: Ausonius.

It really is groundbreaking. You should buy a copy.

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Another missing bit of metadata. RRC 239/3 and RRC 239/4. These images live on the bottom of page 30 of binder 11.

There are more on the bottom of page 31, including RRC 239/2.