Caracalla on Ancient Rome

The Met's Caracalla Denarius Promised Imperial Heirs and Then Rome Erased the Bride

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The coin is silver, struck at Rome, and weighs under four grams. On the front there is no emperor at all. The bust is a woman’s, draped, with the legend PLAVTILLAE AVGVSTAE running around her. Turn it over and two figures stand clasping right hands, Caracalla and his wife Plautilla, under the words PROPAGO IMPERI. The empire’s continuation. Heirs, in other words, promised on the currency.

The Met dates it between 202 and 205 CE. Those three years are the entire window in which this coin made sense, and it is worth understanding why the window shut.

How Much Silver Was in a Roman Denarius? Debasement Tables From Augustus to Diocletian

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

An Augustan denarius held about 3.8 grams of silver. An antoninianus of Claudius II, struck about 290 years later and tariffed at two denarii, held about six hundredths of a gram. The face value stayed put. Almost everything else went.

Nobody sat down and decided to wreck the Roman currency. It happened in small steps, most of them defensible in their year, and then all at once in the 260s. The numbers below track how.

Damnatio Memoriae: Rome's War on Memory

Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In the Altes Museum in Berlin there is a circular painted panel, tempera on wood, roughly 30 centimeters in diameter, made in Egypt around 200 AD. It shows a Roman imperial family in full regalia: a bearded emperor in the upper right wearing the jeweled diadem of the Severan dynasty; his wife beside him on the upper left, dark-eyed and elaborately coiffed; a young man below them in the center wearing his own smaller diadem. A fourth face occupies the lower left — or rather, a fourth face should occupy it. What is there instead is bare wood, scratched down to nothing by something sharp, the ghost of a face removed with deliberate force at some point after the panel was painted. The family portrait has three people in it. It was made to have four.

Roman Citizenship: The Most Valuable Thing Rome Gave Away

Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Roman citizenship was, for most of Roman history, a restricted status that conferred concrete legal advantages and carried genuine political weight. It was also, uniquely among ancient states, something Rome was willing to extend — gradually, pragmatically, and eventually universally — in a process that transformed a city-state’s civic identity into the legal framework of a multinational empire. The story of Roman citizenship is the story of how Rome absorbed the world it conquered without ceasing, at least formally, to be Rome.