Coins on Ancient Rome

Julius Caesar's 44 BCE Denarius: The Coin That Helped Get Him Killed

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The silver coin in the Smithsonian’s National Numismatic Collection is small, about 19 millimetres across, and it carries the face of a man who had weeks to live. On one side is Julius Caesar, head turned to the right. On the other is Venus, holding a small figure of Victory in one hand and a sceptre in the other. It was struck in Rome in 44 BCE.

That doesn’t sound radical. Rulers put their faces on money all the time. But Romans didn’t, and that’s the whole point.

Juno Moneta: How a Roman Goddess Gave Us the Words Money and Mint

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every time you say “money” you’re saying the name of a Roman goddess. Juno Moneta had a temple on the Capitoline Hill, the Romans made their coins next to it, and her title ended up attached to the coins themselves. A silver denarius from 46 BCE in the Smithsonian’s National Numismatic Collection shows her face.

The funny part is that Moneta had nothing to do with money to begin with.

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.

Roman Money: Coinage, Inflation, and Collapse

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

Rome was not the first state to use coinage, but it was the first to use it at the scale of an empire. The denarius — the standard silver coin of the Republic and early Empire — circulated from Britain to Mesopotamia, funding armies, paying officials, and enabling the commercial transactions that integrated the Mediterranean economy. The story of Roman coinage is in some sense the story of Roman fiscal history: how the empire monetized its power, how it debased its currency under fiscal pressure, and how the collapse of monetary confidence contributed to the political and economic crisis of the third century.