Colonial Coinages, and the Lack Thereof: Financing Colonial Programs outside Italy (ca. 140 - 70 B.C.E.) (20 min)

Presenters

Charles Parisot-Sillon, IRAMAT-CEB and the University of Orléans

Abstract

After several decades marked with moderate interest in the development of colonial programs during the mid-second century B.C.E., the late second and early first centuries show a renewed involvement of the Roman state in such activities. While recent works have investigated allusions to (anti-)Gracchan or Marian land policies in the iconography of contemporaneous republican coinage, there were no new colonial coinages being produced in Italy during this period. Conversely, an extensive issue of serrated denarii (RRC 282/1–5) has been tentatively associated with the deduction of Narbo Martius (Narbonne), the first colonial establishment with Roman citizenship founded outside the Italian peninsula in 118 B.C.E. A reappraisal of the circulation of this coinage, as well as new archaeometric data, give way to a more nuanced picture: While at least part of it was probably minted in Narbonne, it is argued that this should not be understood as a proper colonial coinage; instead, these denarii may have been issued in order to subsidize the construction of the Via Domitia and were rapidly incorporated into the monetary flow of Western Mediterranean commercial networks. The bronze issues of Valentia (Valencia), struck at roughly the same period, appear as a much more conventional colonial coinage, the uses of which will be investigated up to the Sertorian war. On a general level, it appears that most colonial establishments had no specific coinage during the late republic, a situation which appears in sharp contrast with that of both the Mid-Republican and Imperial periods. This paper thus aims at stressing out the alternative solutions that the Roman state and colonial authorities came up with, as well as understanding how colonial coins, when extant, mixed with republican and local, non-Roman currencies in colonial contexts, especially outside Italy.