William E. Metcalf

‘‘The proper use of the Republican coinage as a historical source,’’ wrote Michael Crawford (1974) ‘‘depends on the fulfillment of three conditions - a full and accurate account must be given of its contents, a chronological framework must be provided, and the mints at which it was produced must be identified.’’ He then set out, in a magisterial work, to establish an enduring framework for the study of republican coinage that despite some imperfections (Hersh 1977; H. B. Mattingly 1977), and some revisions necessitated by the discovery of new material (Hersh and Walker 1984), has been the basis for all work since.

The same strictures might have been applied to the coinage of the empire, although here the groundwork had been much more carefully laid. Long before 1974 one of the world’s principal collections had been described in detail (H. Mattingly 1923; Carson 1962), and handbooks describing the principal varieties of known coins existed for most of the period. Though the British Museum Catalogue has advanced no further, steadily higher standards for the handbooks, and their extension to cover the entire empire (Sutherland 1967; Bruun 1966; Kent 1981, 1994) have made the need for detailed descriptions of major collections less pressing, and only Paris has subsequently embarked on publication of its extensive holdings (Giard 1976-98).

The traditional, hellenocentric definition treated as Greek coins all coins of Greek city-states and their successors and all coins not bearing Latin legends, whatever their language. The most important development of the last few decades has been an expansion of the definition of what constitutes Roman coinage. A step in this direction was taken by Crawford in a synthetic treatment (1985); and while all the handbooks and most catalogues of collections follow the older tradition, describing coins of the denarius system and its lineal successors, there has been increasing recognition that this provides only a partial view of the currency of the Roman world (Harl 1987; Howgego 1995). Roman provincial coins - some of them indeed minted at the capital - have generated enormous bibliography and a union catalogue of this material, based on the ten major collections of the world, is in progress (Burnett and Amandry 1992, 1999).