Latin colonies – Liv Mariah Yarrow

HN Italy 718. Venusia. ‘double-nummus’. Image from Burnett, ‘La monetazione di Venosa…’ (1991), 4.1.

This post is hot on the heels of the last. There is a lot going on in the numismatic world of SE Italy during the Hannibalic War. I wish I had a copy of Marchetti’s Histoire économique et monétaire de la deuxième querre punique (1975) to hand. I can’t let go my concerns about the CA series and its attribution to Canusium, especially when the Latin colony Venusia just 40km up the same river valley and on the Via Appia (the better road!) was Marcellus’ base of operations and thus hosting many soldiers in need of payment. So I thought I’d peak at the Venusian coins–I can’t type Venusian without smirking and thinking of hippy-dippy alien theorists–but in all seriousness I observe a couple of things:

The quincunx, teruncius, biunx, and sescuncia are all reported as being overstruck on other issues (HN Italy 720-723).
The coin above is signed by a quaestor with the initials CA.

No this isn’t a smoking gun, but if I was a Roman general looking for a mint in the Aufidus region I think I’d pick a colony near a troop base on a main road, even if they were a little lazy about not recasting flans.

Burnett, and HN Italy following Burnett, read GA.Q, not CA.Q, but C/G are pretty much the same letter form in this period and most subsequent ones. The letter forms are different from the CA on Roman coins and I can’t actually bring myself to say RRC 100 is actually close in ‘style’ to any of the Venusian specimens I’ve looked at.

This is not the only coin in the region that seems to be signed by a quaestor. Reportedly (I’ve not seen an image) Naples, S.2219 = HN Italy Brundisium 749 reads M.PV Q. Brundisium is also a Latin colony and a major military staging post in this period of the second Hannibalic War. In fact it seems THE major port and certainly M. Valerius Laevinus’ original base before he started his cross Adriatic shenanigans. Brundisium’ coinage is signed by a bunch of magistrates. And most of M.PV’s coins aren’t labelled with a Q.

These two instances of quaestors at Latin colonies got me thinking about quaestors and coinage more generally. As I’ve said before, there isn’t a lot of evidence on 3rd century quaestors generally and that part of what made the signed Egadi rams special, but here are two more quaestors.

Are they local quaestors? Probably, the lex Osca Bantina of the late second early first century BC mentions quaestors in its list of magistrates and it is thought to derive from an earlier Venusian prototype (Bispham 2007: 142-152, p. 143 n. 124 lists other examples of Italian communities borrowing the structure of Rome’s magistracies). That said, Badian in his 1975 article on the quaestorship spent a lot of time thinking about the Roman expansion of the quaestorship and the growth and change of the coinage system. These two minor examples might lend a little weight to the idea of a third century connection between coinage and quaestors. And might help point the way towards how we should be thinking about some of the unidentified signatures on Roman series. … Early posts on quaestors.

Yes, I’m still laughing about ‘Venusian’:

A useful map:

Capture — From Fonda, Between Rome and Carthage (CUP 2010): xx; note especially the indication of the limits of river navigation!

A slightly clearer image of the coin above taken from Carroccio 2008:

ANS Specimens of Ariminum Cast Bronze. Click image form more details.

It strikes me that that the cast bronze types of Ariminum bear a marked similarity to the types of the Roman currency bars. Ariminum became a Latin colony in 268 BC and the cast bronze dates to sometime after that date. The one type I couldn’t find to illustrate has a shield as the reverse type. Its as seems to be heavier than the Roman (350-400g) and it divides the as into a base-10, instead of base-12 fractions. It shares these characteristics with Hadria and Vestini (Crawford, CMRR, p. 43 & HN Italy p. 17).

Ariminum types above all represent different denominations. [Scale can be so deceptive in online images!] Shield = quincunx, Sword and scabbard = quadrunx, trident = teruncius, dolphin = biunx, rostrum = uncia, shell = semuncia.

This suggests they were created as a series at one moment in time. Perhaps they took their inspiration from the currency bars? With the exception of the shell all of these are well known images on the bars. Below is a collection of images to refresh your memory. And one more specimen of Ariminum, the trident of which better parallels the bars.

AND, just as icing on the cake, the rostrum on the uncia confirms Kondratieff’s interpretation of the currency bar iconography from a different angle. [HN Italy got the uncia identification right, but still kept the trident of RRC.]

There is nothing that comes to mind that would preclude the possibility that the shield and sword currency bars were made at the same time as the naval types…