Dr. David Gwynn
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4 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 21 Dec
Dr. David Gwynn’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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No. And interestingly, the Roman Empire does have mechanisms for if a community can prove they are exhausted and cannot pay. We do actually have imperial laws saying, right, for 10 years, this region is not paying taxes. There's no question there must have been a series of local incidents that we very rarely hear about. Our best glimpse is Egypt.
That's basically just because of the Egyptian papyri that survives in the desert. But that's where you find complaints, for example, being sent to a local army commander that the sheep are being sheared in the night. So someone's breaking into farms and stealing the wool just before the sheep will be sheared.
So they complain to the local army commander because he's the one who's supposed to be maintaining law and order. It's entirely possible it was the army commander who sent his soldiers to do it. So there's not going to be a lot of justice here. And yet, while there is ongoing, therefore, tension, no, there are no really major social revolutions. Because overall, the Roman system did work.
It didn't work brilliantly. But most people, of course, can't see a better solution. And crucially, thanks to Diocletian and Constantine, across most of the empire, life is relatively stable.
The coinage is one of our key markers for imperial prosperity. Now, a lot of the empire didn't actually need to worry much about coinage. After all, a lot of local economic transactions can continue in kind. You just do it as barter. The key purpose of the coinage is the emperors mint it to pay the army. The army spend it and the tax system brings it back. Very crudely, that's the cycle.
Now, in the third century, the coinage, above all the quality of the gold and silver coinage, collapses. The silver coinage in particular goes from above 50% silver to less than 5%. And then we do have decrees that tell us that people were refusing to use it. Because a Roman coin, of course, differs from a modern 50p piece. Our money is not worth what it's made of.
A Roman coin is worth its metal content. So debasement, taking the precious metal out, they're very good at noticing when that's been done. This is why you bite a coin or you try and bend it. In the third century, the coinage did basically collapse. The result was major inflation. That's going to particularly disrupt long distance exchange and the elite attempts to spend large sums of money.
In local communities, what seems to have happened is a reversion to barter, because then you can manage it to a degree. Diocletian and the Tetrarchy set out to try and fix it. Now, there were two options there. You could stabilize the coinage by giving it proper metal content, and you can try and control inflation.
The problem with trying to control inflation, which is what they did by passing an edict called the Edict of Maximum Prices, so laying down this is the maximum anyone can legally charge for a particular good or service, is that totally ignores supply and demand and basically failed almost immediately. The problem with stabilizing the coins is you need gold and silver for that.
And the problem, of course, is now that the Roman Empire is no longer conquering anywhere, Trajan was the last person to bring in a flood of treasure from outside the empire. Where's the gold and silver going to come from? The result is the Tetrarchy can't succeed.
Exactly. And all the great Mediterranean gold and silver mines have been largely played out. So Philippa Maston used the ones in the northern Aegean. Spain, it's always ironic because anyone who's been studying late history thinks of Spain as bringing in gold and silver from the Americas. But actually, in the ancient world, Spain was a good place to go to to find those metals.
The person who actually solves the problem is Constantine, because Constantine does have access to gold and silver that the Tetrarchs didn't. That's because there's no way that the Tetrarchs, who were devout pagan emperors, would touch pagan temples. Constantine will.
There are gold and silver statues of the ancient gods and goddesses, and we don't have them today because most of them get plundered. But Constantine uses that source of gold and silver and uses it to create a new gold coin Interestingly, you can do a chemical analysis on gold and silver coins to try and work out where the gold may have been originally mined.
A number of Constantine's coins and the coins of his successors, the gold seems to have come from the northern Aegean. These are Hellenistic temple treasures. They're the ones that Philip and Alexander, that's where they got their gold from. So these are Hellenistic statues of gods and goddesses being reused for coinage.
But the result is Constantine stabilizes the gold coinage, the solidus, the solid bit. is simply the name for the gold coin. It will remain basically at the same rough level of gold and the rough weight unchanged for centuries to come. So the gold coinage is actually basically stabilized in the fourth century.
It's true, actually, of the Roman Empire right through its history. When everything's working as smoothly as they can manage, it's a relatively stable structure with major inbuilt inequalities. But it's not designed to cope with shock. They don't have those reserves in place. And if the shock comes, the fracture lines can all open up.
The Eastern Empire, of course, in the fifth century, is going to solve a lot of its problems by minting lots of gold coins and paying them off. So Attila the Hun gets 6,000 pounds of gold in one go. And yet the East could afford to do that. Whereas in the West, as the economic structures break down, you can't pay the army, you can't pay off enemies.
So all these different elements, they'll cope as long as things are relatively stable, as they are by the end of Constantine's reign. They can just about cope with the disruption caused by Julian's disaster, although it forced a reallocation of resources to the Persian frontier that weakened the others. but they are vulnerable if the shock comes.
The Persian Empire is the greatest single enemy the Romans ever have to face. It's the only other world-scale empire. So the Persian frontier always had to be a primary focus of attention. The usual estimate is roughly 40% of the Roman army needs to be watching the Persian frontier.
And if you take troops away from it, as, for example, Justinian will do in the 6th century, the Persians will wait to see if it's a definite movement and then smash through your defenses. So the Persians are playing a key role of leverage.
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