Abstract:The provincial coinage of the Roman Empire has proven to be a rich source for studying civic experiences of Roman rule, but the coins struck outside Rome during the expansion of the Roman Republic have, by contrast, received relatively little attention. This article aims to begin redressing this neglect by exploring the active role of coinage in conceptualising and representing Roman Republican power. A variety of approaches to this neglected material are employed in order to highlight its potential as a source. Ambiguity, iconology or the social life of images, and entanglement are used as frameworks to explore case studies from across the Roman Republican world, from Spain to Syria. This approach to coin imagery under the Republic reveals the complexity and variety in which the Roman presence, and Roman imperium, was represented before the advent of the principate. IntroductionIn 'Notes towards an anthropology of money' Keith Hart observes that communities operate through culture or meanings held in common, and that 'money is, with language, the most important vehicle for this collective sharing'.1 Money is a media that enables the commensuration of differing value systems (crucial to conquest or contact situations) and whose circulation defines particular political and/or social groupings. Money contributes to a sense of commonality, and its iconography encourages collective traditions, values and memory.2 Money is, in short, one of several media that actively contribute to the formation and maintenance of a community and its traditions. It achieves this by being used, handled, seen andThe following abbreviations are used: ACIP: Villaronga, L. and J. Benages, (eds). (2011) These functions were also present in the Roman world. Howgego has recently demonstrated the connection between coinage and Roman expansion, and the detailed study of the site of Lattara in Gaul has revealed how Roman conquest within this one settlement lead to an increased presence of money in order to facilitate exchange and commensuration between differing value systems.4 Although site finds often only contain coins that have been lost or discarded, and the archaeological record is far from complete, the presence of significant quantities of coins at excavated settlements (whether they be large cities like Athens or Corinth, Roman legionary camps like Numantia, or smaller settlements like Lattara or the mining village of La Loba) demonstrates that coinage did have a role in everyday life. 5 The extent of rural coin use is more controversial, but here new studies, at least for the imperial period, suggest coin use was higher than has originally believed. 6Studies of Roman coinage have demonstrated how these media enabled Roman expansion and acted as 'monuments in miniature' that expressed and reinforced cultural values.7 Imperial coins commonly carried imagery focused on the imperial family. The (mostly bronze) coinage struck by individual cities in the Roman Empire, labelled provincial coinage in modern scholarship, carried type...

No abstract

and, especially, religious hybridity. Mamre notoriously attracted Jews, Christians and pagans who worshipped side-by-side into the fifth century, despite the efforts of Constantine and his bishops. Bethesda at various times housed a Jewish healing site, a shrine of Asclepius and a Christian basilica, while dedications at the Fountain of Lamps evoke all three traditions without fitting securely into any. Again, the 'polysemous' flexibility of the word angelos seems to facilitate religious mobility. Increasingly, though, Christian authorities labour to wrest the sites and the wordaway from non-Christian users. Chapter 6, 'Angels of a Christian God', traces fourth-and fifth-century Church efforts to distinguish between right and wrong ways for Christians to venerate angels, and to channel veneration of angels into acceptable forms. The centrepiece is Canon 35 of the Synod of Laodicea (c. 360 C.E.), which forbids Christians to 'abandon the church. .. invoke angeloi, and hold meetings', practices labelled 'secret idolatry'. Since Theodoret of Cyrrhus, this has been interpreted as an attempt to suppress angelos veneration entirely. C. argues, however, that Laodicea's concern was specifically with extra-ecclesial gatherings that might undermine ecclesiastical authority or give rise to heterodox practices, whether 'Judaizing' (as in Colossians 2:18-19) or 'magic' (as in Laodicea Canon 36). On this reading, late-antique shrines of Michael are not signs of backsliding, but part of a process of harnessing the ritual power of angelos veneration in support of ecclesiastical authority. C. does a useful service in assembling the epigraphic evidence for Christian and non-Christian angels. Many readers will want more, however. Any book that combines Christian and non-Christian, literary and epigraphic material risks leaving specialists in each area unsatisfied. I often wished for more systematic discussion of the philosophical or theological issues at stake; a clear discussion of Platonist daimonology is a particular desideratum in the early chapters. The Christian context in which C. locates his inscriptions is heavily slanted toward the 'orthodox', despite C.'s interest in the heterodox potential of angeloi. The case-study approach also renders the argument as a whole somewhat disjointed. It is left to the reader to discern patterns across chapters, and it is not always clear whether C.'s examples are representative or exhaustive of their category. Finally, the writing is frequently stiff and repetitive, the proofreading poor. The definitive modern study of ancient Mediterranean angeloi has yet to be written.

Coinage remains one of the best resources from which to gain an insight into the public image of empresses in the Roman Empire. This article employs a quantitative approach to the coinage of the Severan women, utilizing coin hoards to gain an idea of the frequency of particular coin types. The result offers a nuanced and contextual assessment of the differing public images of the Severan empresses and their role within wider Severan ideology. Evidence is presented to suggest that in this period there was one workshop at the mint dedicated to striking coins for the empresses. The Severan women played a key connective role in the dynasty, a position communicated publicly through their respective numismatic images. By examining the dynasty as a whole, subtle changes in image from empress to empress and from reign to reign can be identified. During the reign of Elagabalus, the divergence in imagery between Julia Soaemias and Julia Maesa is so great that we can perhaps see the influence of these women on their own numismatic image.

No abstract