reviewed by Andrew Meadows
M. Spoerri Butcher. Roman Provincial Coinage, Volume 7. De Gordien Ier à Gordien III (238-244 après J.-C.). 1. Province d’Asie (London/Paris, 2006). 324 pp., 67 plates. $240.
V. Heuchert and C. Howgego, Roman Provincial Coinage Online (http://rpc.ashmus.ox.ac.uk/). Free access.
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The RPC series was conceived as a traditional type corpus of the coins struck by the cities, peoples, and kingdoms under Roman rule. Each distinct type was assigned a number and illustrated in a section of plates at the end of the volume. The task of collecting the material was made more manageable by the introduction of the concept of “core collections,” that is to say, public collections whose contents were guaranteed to be included in the corpus, with coins from other collections being included less systematically, but as available to the authors. This pragmatic decision proved to be well-judged, and while two supplements have now appeared to the original two volumes (on which see below), these have contained little of startling novelty. The layout of these first two volumes is straightforward, though in some respects novel. The mints are arranged not by geographic region (as, for example, in Historia Numorum) but by province (and, in the case of Asia, by conventus). Each mint is then provided with a brief historical introduction and a summary of minting activity, followed by a numerical sequence of types. Each volume is provided with indices of types, legends, mints, imperial titles, magistrates’ names, personal names, and countermarks. In both cases the plates are bound separately, so that images and text may be open on the desk together.
In conception, the new RPC online volume is closest to the first two volumes, though markedly different in its realization. The Web site, hosted by the University of Oxford, where its authors are based, holds the data destined for volume 4 in the series, devoted to all issues struck under the Antonine emperors. It is based on the same principle of core collections and presents a discrete entry for each identified type. When provided by the online database, each type description contains the same categories of data as the printed volumes, along with lists of known specimens, and a representative image of the type on the same screen. The major difference comes in the way that this data may be searched. All of the categories covered by the indices of volumes 1 and 2 may be searched (with the exception of countermarks), but many other searches are possible too: date, metal, diameter, and weight are the simplest of these, and offer obvious possibilities to those wanting to use the corpus to identify their own coins. More complex are the searches that may be done by other reference works, providing effectively a concordance between RPC IV and all the published studies or collections that are used as reference works in the volume, and a thematic search of coin types, which allows for searches of the material that goes beyond the numismatic (the categories currently offered are: Animals, Architecture, Deities / Personifications, Games, Heroes / Famous Persons, Imperial Family, and Objects. There is flexibility too in the display of search results that goes beyond what is possible in a book. Coins of interest may be gathered and displayed together through the use of a “purse” function. When a type is represented by more than one specimen, an option is available to choose illustrations of different specimens, not just the single one chosen by the authors and to which the print version is necessarily limited. Another feature of the online version draws attention to a further clear benefit of the Web: the facility for the reader/user to offer new coin types to the editors. Clicking the “Submit a new coin type” button summons up a form (to which an image can be added), so that anyone who believes they know of something not included in the database can easily make the editors aware. This is the function currently served by the RPC supplementary volumes, but the RPC IV solution obviates the need for awkward extra volumes of limited availability (RPC Supplement I is now out of print), or to seek out other information from different sources (RPC Supplement II, not advertised in any of the existing volumes, may currently be found at www.uv.es/~ripolles/rpc_s2.
Given such obvious advantages to database publication of a type-corpus, the printed volume might begin to look redundant or at least outdated. As if to answer that criticism, the remarkable study of M. Spoerri Butcher that has now been published as RPC VII.1 offers a different way forward. Covering just six years and one province, the author has dispensed with the broad brush and painted as detailed a picture of the coin production of the cities of Asia as one could wish for. Gone are the eleven core collections: no fewer than thirty-two public and twenty private collections are listed (as well as the cast collections of the Griechisches Münzwerk and Winterthur). The resulting accumulation of material has allowed Spoerri Butcher to provide not just a type corpus, but a die corpus for her chosen field. As in RPC I and II, the mints are presented by conventus and are again furnished with a short summary introduction. Each type is then provided with a separate reference number, and under this are listed the known specimens, listed by die combination. Illustrations are then provided for each type (not, as in a traditional die study, for each combination).
But while this catalogue (“Étude Numismatique”), which occupies center stage in the book, looks superficially similar to the earlier volumes, it for two obvious reasons offers far more scope for discussion in the introduction (“Étude Historique”). First, the volume deals with just a single province and a short period. It is thus possible to analyze the material in a more detailed fashion than must be the case when dealing, as volumes 1, 2, and 4 do, with the whole empire. And so Spoerri Butcher provides three chapters of analysis dealing with the geographical and historical background, imperial authority (iconography and legends of the obverse), and the world of the cities (iconography and legends of the reverse). Crudely summarized, it appears that the engravers of the obverses were allowed, or allowed themselves, a fair degree of latitude in the reproduction of official titulature, and when engraving “pseudo-autonomous” obverses were more inclined to provide explanatory inscriptions than were their counterparts in other times and at other places. The reverses show a similar amount of variety in their legends, with, for example, only the glorious civic titles finding regular places on the designs. The reverse designs hold few surprises, with a liberal spread of local myths, legendary founders, and a relatively homogenous pantheon of divinities and personifications. For the Homonoia coinages (of which there are seventeen examples in the period under discussion), a single explanation is rejected in favor of a more ad hoc rationale, perhaps to do with locality or perhaps something more political than military. There is much also to be gleaned of the functioning of the magistrates who signed numerous issues of this period.
The second new opportunity that is opened up for discussion in this volume is provided by the die study. In chapter 4, Spoerri Butcher provides an overview of the monetary production of Asia during this period. By comparison of raw numbers of active mints under the Gordians with earlier and later periods (back to the reign of Severus Alexander and forward as far as Claudius II) she can show at least that there is neither drastic increase nor decline in the numbers of cities producing coins in the period 238-244. But this of course can tell us nothing about levels of coin production. For the Gordianic period, her die study enables estimation of the numbers of dies used, and this allows the establishment of a rank of productivity (Ephesus, Germe, and Cyzicus are at the top). The majority of cities (48) used between one and seven obverse dies throughout the whole period, or one or less die per annum. Once we have more figures of this sort for other reigns and provinces, we will be able to talk meaningfully about levels of monetization in the cities of the Roman Empire.
A lengthy analysis of the denominations employed by the cities of Asia allows Spoerri Butcher to confirm the broad lines of interpretation of denominational proposed by Ann Johnston (Nomismata 1 Historisch-numismatische Forschungen. Internationales Kolloquium zur kaiserzeitlichen Munzpragung Kleinasiens 27. -30. April 1994 in der Staatliche Munzsammlung, Munchen [Milan, 1997], 205-220).
Finally, in a chapter of historical interpretation of the coinage as a whole, Spoerri Butcher puts it firmly in its place: “The historical significance of the coinage issued under Gordian III in the province of Asia seems to lie at the local level.... This coinage remained little affected by the political and military events that characterized the years 238-244.” The contrast, one might add, with nearby Lycia could not be more marked (Cf. A.T. Tek in XIII Congreso Internacional de Numismatica I, 947-957).
Spoerri Butcher has produced a volume of RPC, but at the same time she has begun the process of analysis of the data that RPC was intended to facilitate. For both of these works she is to be congratulated warmly. But where does this leave the RPC franchise? Two fundamentally different models are now available to the project. Neither of these, nor that of the two previous volumes, is inherently better. If one likes one’s corpora to look uniform throughout, then one will complain. But there is no reason for corpora with such a lengthy lifespan to remain inflexibly wedded to a single template. Times change, technology changes. For the future, we must hope that all volumes produced by the project will be produced in or converted to an easily manipulated and searchable format such as that offered by the online version of RPC. We look forward to the time when all periods and provinces can be subjected to the same level of scrutiny as that of Asia under Gordian. That such things can now be envisioned is a credit to the authors and the “Direction scientifique” of these bold new publications.
-Andrew Meadows