Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Philip Grierson's contribution to numismatics
- A bibliography of the writings of Philip Grierson
- Introduction
- 1 Thoughts on the beginnings of coinage
- 2 The life of obverse dies in the Hellenistic period
- 3 Roman coinage of the Cyrenaica, first century bc to first century ad
- 4 Roman imperial coin types and the formation of public opinion
- 5 Coin hoards and Roman coinage of the third century AD
- 6 Belgian finds of late fourth-century Roman bronze
- 7 The re-use of obsolete coins: the case of Roman imperial bronzes revived in the late fifth century
- 8 Interpreting the alloy of the Merovingian silver coinagae
- 9 Carolingian gold coins from the Ilanz hoard
- 10 The novi denarii and forgery in the ninth century
- 11 On the rejection of good coin in Carolingian Europe
- 12 Ælfred the Great's abandonment of the concept of periodic recoinage
- 13 King or Queen? An eleventh-century pfennig of Duisburg
- 14 Personal names on Norman coins of the eleventh century: an hypothesis
- 15 The Gornoslav hoard, the Emperor Frederick I, and the Monastery of Bachkovo
- 16 Coinages of Barcelona (1209 to 1222): the documentary evidence
- 17 Finds of English medieval coins in Schleswig-Holstein
- 18 Privy-marking and the trial of the pyx
- 19 Judicial documents relating to coin forgery
- 20 Mint organisation in the Burgundian Netherlands in the fifteenth century
- 21 Coinage in Andrew Halyburton's Ledger
- 22 Imitation in later medieval coinage: the influence of Scottish types abroad
- 23 Barter in fifteenth-century Genoa
- Index
4 - Roman imperial coin types and the formation of public opinion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Philip Grierson's contribution to numismatics
- A bibliography of the writings of Philip Grierson
- Introduction
- 1 Thoughts on the beginnings of coinage
- 2 The life of obverse dies in the Hellenistic period
- 3 Roman coinage of the Cyrenaica, first century bc to first century ad
- 4 Roman imperial coin types and the formation of public opinion
- 5 Coin hoards and Roman coinage of the third century AD
- 6 Belgian finds of late fourth-century Roman bronze
- 7 The re-use of obsolete coins: the case of Roman imperial bronzes revived in the late fifth century
- 8 Interpreting the alloy of the Merovingian silver coinagae
- 9 Carolingian gold coins from the Ilanz hoard
- 10 The novi denarii and forgery in the ninth century
- 11 On the rejection of good coin in Carolingian Europe
- 12 Ælfred the Great's abandonment of the concept of periodic recoinage
- 13 King or Queen? An eleventh-century pfennig of Duisburg
- 14 Personal names on Norman coins of the eleventh century: an hypothesis
- 15 The Gornoslav hoard, the Emperor Frederick I, and the Monastery of Bachkovo
- 16 Coinages of Barcelona (1209 to 1222): the documentary evidence
- 17 Finds of English medieval coins in Schleswig-Holstein
- 18 Privy-marking and the trial of the pyx
- 19 Judicial documents relating to coin forgery
- 20 Mint organisation in the Burgundian Netherlands in the fifteenth century
- 21 Coinage in Andrew Halyburton's Ledger
- 22 Imitation in later medieval coinage: the influence of Scottish types abroad
- 23 Barter in fifteenth-century Genoa
- Index
Summary
The authority and personality of the Roman emperor and his government were mediated to the subject population in a variety of ways. Perhaps the most important was the complex of stories circulating probably even among relatively humble people, many of them about contact with the emperor or his representatives. Of course such contact itself, when it occurred, also mediated the authority and personality of the emperor and his government; the imperial cult, too, had an important role to play, as did the erection of figured monuments and imperial buildings and the distribution of imperial largesse. Within the empire as a whole, the plebs in Rome naturally had privileged access to the benefits of imperial rule and saw far more of the emperor and his works.
On the nature and importance within this context of the rôle of the imperial coinage widely differing views are expressed; at one extreme there is the view that the emperor himself paid particular attention to the choice of types for his coinage in order to draw attention to his virtues and his successes and that these types had a major impact on the population of the Roman Empire, at the other extreme the view that only a minor department of government was involved and that the pictorial types of the imperial coinage were little noticed and often misunderstood.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Studies in Numismatic MethodPresented to Philip Grierson, pp. 47 - 64Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1983
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