Roman Monetary Notations for Small Change

• Autores: Flip De Bree
• Localización: Ancient society, ISSN 0066-1619, Nº. 49, 2019, págs. 259-325
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This paper revisits and summarises the notations used for recording sums of money in Roman times, when the prevailing accounting unit was either the as, sestertius or denarius or, in the eastern part of the empire, the drachm. A series of searches in literary, epigraphical and papyrological sources was carried out, with a particular focus on tracing both the duodecimal and the — less common — decimal notations for small change mentioned in Lucius Volusius Maecianus’ Distributio Partium. The search results confirm their existence as well as their parallel use in the Roman imperial period. In addition, some mixed and unexpected versions of the Roman monetary notations were found. The dating of the various notations points to a one-to-one link with the main stream Greek-Roman monetary/numismatic history.