THE ATHENIANAGORA RESULTS OF EXCAVATIONS CONDUCTED BY THE AMERICAN SCHOOL OF CLASSICAL STUDIES AT ATHENS VOLUME II Athens COINS at FROM THE ROMAN THROUGH THE VENETIAN PERIOD BY Studies CC-BY-NC-ND. MARGARET THOMPSON License: Classical of fbj AP A J only. Ak~ use School personal American © For THE AMERICAN SCHOOL OF CLASSICAL STUDIES AT ATHENS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY I954 American School of Classical Studies at Athens is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to The Athenian Agora ® www.jstor.org Athens at Studies CC-BY-NC-ND. License: Classical PRINTED of only. use IN School GERMANY ALL RIGHTS personal at American J.J.AUGUSTIN RESERVED © For GLOCKSTADT PREFACE Between the years 1931 and 1949 the American excavations in the Athenian Agora produced 55,492 coins of Roman and later periods. The catalogued entries in this publication, ranging in date from the last century of the Roman Republic to the declining years of the Republic of Venice, total 37,090 specimens; the remaining Islamic and Modern Greek pieces have been Athens listed summarily in order that the tally may be complete. This is an overwhelming amount of at coinage, which in sheer quantity represents a collection comparableto many in the numismatic museums of the world. Unfortunately very few of the Agora coins are museum pieces, but lamentable as is their general condition to the eye of the coin collector or the cataloguer, they do provide for the historian an invaluable record of the money circulating in one of the chief cities of from the time of Sulla to our own Studies antiquity present. CC-BY-NC-ND. The Agora Excavations are still in progress. Coins have been unearthed since 1949 and more will certainly result from successive years of digging until the project is at last finished. How- ever, the area as a whole has been excavated in depth; what remains to be done is more in the nature of a cleaning-up operation, from which coins emerge in fairly small numbers. There License: Classical is no reason to suppose that whatever is found in the future will affect the present picture to of any appreciable extent. only. For the classification of the Agora coins an admirable recording system was developed by Mrs. T. Leslie Shear, who has been in charge of the Coin Department from the beginning of the use excavation Each identifiable coin was a on which were School program. given separate envelope typed details of size, metal, provenance, date of finding, description and reference. These envelopes were filed chronologically by excavation sections. In every case, the same information was transcribed on individual catalogue cards, which were arranged by emperors and types. While the coins remain in Athens and will eventually form an integral part of the contemplated Agora personal Museum, the cards were brought to this country for study purposes and are now located at the American Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. It is from these cards that the present publication © For has been compiled. There is no need to point out the drawbacksinvolved in working from a card catalogue with the documents themselves five thousand miles distant. Ideally each coin should have been checked prior to publication. An undertaking of this sort would require someone thoroughly experienced in excavation material and able to devote several years to a slow and painstaking reexamination. Perhaps such a person could have been found in the course of time. I confess that my spirit quails at the very thought of going back over 3775 coins of Manuel and 1855 of Constantius II, and it seems to me doubtful that the resulting increase in accuracy would be commensurate with the labor involved. Without any question there are mistakes in the present tabulation -mistakes of identification and mistakes of transcription. Many individuals worked vi THE ATHENIAN AGORA: COINS at one time or another on the classification and on the records. We would all, I think, agree that in the course of our exposure to the swollen, chipped and defaced scraps of metal which excavations invariably produce, we at times saw things we ought not to have seen and left unseen those things which we ought to have seen. Yet in all sincerity I do not believe that such errors are numerous, and I am confident that those which do exist have no real significance against a background of 37,000 coins. The inaccessibility of the material has in some cases presented particular problems for a detailed tabulation. Where criteria of style determine the attribution of issues identical in type, I have, without the coins before me, been unable even to attempt a distinction between the different mints. Such pieces have been listed under the city supplying the greater proportion of the Agora coinage for the period, and reference has been made in the commentary to the possibility of an alternative mint. The amount of illustrative material is admittedly slight. Most Athens of the coins are well-known types which need none, but I should have liked to reproduce all at variant and unusual specimens. Unfortunately, as will be obvious from even a cursory glance at the plates, the condition of the average excavation piece is so bad that illustration is almost useless. Even if it were otherwise, I could not feel justified in imposing so great a burden of sorting, selecting and cast-making on someone else. Studies CC-BY-NC-ND. To offset in some measure the handicaps, I have been most fortunate in having the help of Mrs. William P. Wallace, who spent the first four months of 1952 in Athens and who generously offered to examine coins whose identification seemed open to question. Mrs. Wallace checked nearly 300 pieces and her efforts have rectified some uncertain readings and verified others. The notation "confirmed"in sections of the derives from her labors. License: many commentary Classical All of these difficulties were careful consideration before it was decided to undertake of given this tabulation. In the end it was felt by the majority of those directly concerned that the only. advantages of prompt publication, even allowing for inevitable shortcomings, overbalanced the disadvantages. With a few notable exceptions, coins tend to be the stepchildren of excavations. use School Their publication, if attempted at all, is often delayed beyond the period of greatest utility. For those now working on other Agora material and for anyone concerned with the history of Athens, the coins provide vital evidence for the political and economic vicissitudes of the city, evidence which cannot safely be disregarded. Bringing this fundamental material out in usable form at the earliest possible moment has, therefore, seemed highly desirable. personal American The record in its entirety is here, but it cannot be overemphasized that it is intended pri- © For marily as a recordand not as a definitive study of the Roman and Byzantine coinage from the Agora. It is to be hoped that whatever sections seem worthy of further research and inter- pretation will be expanded into special publications as opportunity arises. Attention should also be given to the hoard material. Surprisinglyfew closed deposits of Roman and later periods were found, and in general their chief importance was in dating the contexts in which they were buried rather than in their intrinsic composition. Nevertheless they should be analyzed and worked over in connection with the excavation records. In this catalogue such coins have been included only as individual pieces without reference to their hoard associations. For the most part the format of the tabulation is borroweddirectly from Alfred R. Bellinger's excellent and thoroughly usable publication of the coins from Dura-Europos. Every effort has PREFACE vii been made to provide sufficient information to make the record useful without compelling the reader to refer constantly to the standard catalogues and at the same time to compress the data into reasonably economical limits. These considerations have influenced the seemingly inconsistent pattern which the arrangement of the descriptive material presents for different periods. All issues of any given emperor are grouped together in a silver, antoniniani, bronze sequence with each category listed chronologically. The catalogue numbers of silver coins are in italic type and the same convention has been used for plated and billon specimens. An asterisk following a number indicates that there is some discussion of that entry in the commentary. Unless otherwise specified, the dates and mint identifications are those of the cited reference works. In some cases, notably with the British Museum publications of the Roman period, the dates suggested in the introductions are at times more specific than those given in the catalogues proper. Where such restricted datings seem well-established, they have been adopted in prefer- Athens ence to broader chronological divisions. Mention has been made in the commentary of some at articles supplementing or supersedingthe general reference books, but undoubtedly many valu- able studies have been overlooked, which would need to be consideredin any final study of the currency. For the later Roman period, where uncertainty exists as to the nomenclature of the various Studies CC-BY-NC-ND. denominations, I have followed Pearce's formula of AE1, AE2, AE3 and AE4. This equates roughly with Cohen and Sabatier in this manner: AE1 - Cohen GB AE2 - Cohen MB -= Sabatier AE1 License: Classical AE3 -= Cohen PB -= Sabatier AE2 AE4 = Cohen PB Q = Sabatier AE3 of Such differentiationin size of relative within and not absolute only. is, course, only any given period in any sense. use Mint marks have been omitted from this are recorded on the School listing although they catalogue cards. The Agora coins provide additions to the officinae striking certain types, as cited by Maurice for the Constantinian era and by Wroth for the early Byzantine, but such additions are of minor significance and it was felt that little useful purpose would be served by a long and detailed record of the various officinae and their proportionate representation.