The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Coinage ed. by William E. Metcalf (review)

After an introductory chapter describing the issues surrounding the use of scientific analysis to determine ancient alloys, this Handbook offers a series of roughly chronologically organized chapters on coinage in antiquity, covering archaic and classical Greece, the Hellenistic period, and Rome. The various contributions provide valuable and rather complete information about the different topics they address. Charts, maps, and photographs of coins provide a great navigational aid to the reader, who also gets a sense of the interactive relationships that linked the coinages of these different geographic areas together. Some papers bring up-to-date information about the current state of research in numismatics. With no pretence at being exhaustive, the types analysis and dating of the Lydian electrum coinage (43–49); the evaluation of Hellenistic mints’ production (177, table 10.1); the thorough analysis of Palestine’s coinage during the Hellenistic period (252–74); the discussion around the organization of mints, coinage production and standards under the Flavians (376–83) or in Roman Syria (468–79); and the considerations of Roman Imperial and Provincial third-century coinage production and reforms (461–65 and 540–50) are to be considered with great interest. Contributions on areas less covered by classical numismatics, like those on Persia (61–87), Parthia (275–94) or Iberia (356–74), convey very relevant and interesting information.

One may regret that other coinages heavily influenced by Greek standards, like the Phoenician, Carthaginian, or Celtic issues, are barely covered, with the exception of few short and scattered indirect but still useful hints within other chapters (e.g., 71, 77–78, 151–52, 195, 238, 255, 308, 358–61). The Hellenistic chapters could have included Bactria (mentioned once in that context, 236) and Indo-Greek coinages. Barely a word is said about the Etruscan coinage, with only one allusion about the Etruscan ramo secco (302). Little or no coverage is provided regarding the coinages from Dacia, the Nabataean Kingdom, (mentioned 473), or Arabia.

The main weakness of the Handbook is in fact a tendency to limit its scope to the traditionally accepted categories of classic numismatics, sometimes ignoring the many challenges and new questions arising from more recent research. Regarding electrum coinage, nicely covered during its Lydian phase (43–60, see 38–39 and 62), nothing is said of the widespread use of electrum in the Black Sea region up to the Hellenistic period. Similarly, the question of the fiduciarity of bronze coinage is mostly left unaddressed by the chapters that could have engaged in that question. Bronze is assumed to be fiduciary without further comments (e.g., 148, 161, 240) and then is depicted as a medium whose excessive overvaluation could prove very unpopular, to the point where its minting could be suspended for sixty years (321). That apparent contradiction deserved some treatment of its own. Reluctance to engage more deeply with unsettled questions sometimes leads to inconclusive conclusions, such as the statement that the introduction of coinage in Rome would have been a cultural phenomenon (310). Contemporary numismatic research has opened new fields or renewed ancient questions, like the relationship between the establishment of Roman authority over the East and the mutations of the Hellenistic coinages; the role of imitative, counterfeit, countermarked and token coinages; the relationship between coin circulation, society, trade, and war; and the input brought about by metallurgic analysis regarding the geographic origins of the metals used by ancient coinages. Some of these topics are briefly evoked, without leading to any dedicated chapter. This general tendency to underestimate recent research manifests itself in the bibliographic sections, where, with some notable exceptions, works published after 2000 are often underrepresented.

In sum, covering such a wide range of topics represents a true challenge, and one cannot expect to have all gaps covered in the course of a single book. In all fairness, this Handbook, with chapters by thirty-three contributors, all of them distinguished historians or...