Money in Classical Antiquity by Sitta von Reden (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Money in Classical Antiquity by Sitta von Reden Robert Weir Sitta von Reden. Money in Classical Antiquity. Key Themes in Ancient History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. xxi + 237. US$25.00. ISBN 9780521459525. This book merits recommendation for its solid contribution to the field, thanks to its impressive command of the scholarship and von Reden’s own insights. Nevertheless, no book is perfect. Thus this review will list its deficiencies, extol its merits, and offer synopses of its parts. Given the mandate of the Cambridge Key Themes in Ancient History series to cover broad subjects (e.g., slavery, sport, Roman law, Greek religion) in short compass (about 200 pages) and in a fashion accessible to non-specialists (iii), contributing authors necessarily have an unenviable decision to make: either the Charybdis of very broadly egalitarian coverage at the risk of superficiality and errors in one’s areas of weakness, or the Scylla of a tight focus on selected topics at the risk of misrepresentation through self-indulgence. If von Reden errs, it is toward the latter choice, since the volume plays heavily toward her own considerable strength in the field of Hellenistic economy, which is certainly understandable. For instance, much of the third chapter’s treatment of Roman monetary networks (86–91) originates from the introduction to Roman Provincial Coinage (Burnett, Amandry, and Ripollès 1992: 6–25). Thus, the book’s title is somewhat misleading, since its coverage of the Roman world, to take the obvious instance, is relatively slight and episodic. Although von Reden makes a valiant effort to integrate her chapters with each other for the sake of a consistent book, some chapters (e.g., “Sacred Finance” and “Epilogue”) read like standalone articles. The book’s whole is somehow less than the sum of its brilliant parts. One should also add that this book is not an easy read, largely the result of the author’s distillation, albeit very able, of the complex and controversial scholarship behind almost every page. Another contributing factor is von Reden’s prose style, which often brought the adjective Thucydidean to mind: this reviewer found that he had to read and reread some passages to be sure that they really said what he had first thought they said! When testing the publisher’s claim that this book would be suitable fare for “upper-level students of ancient history” (i), this reviewer assigned one chapter (“Sacred Finance,” 156–185) as a required reading for four Classics majors enrolled in a senior seminar on the archaeology of Greek religion. When the time came, only two students were able to give even a spotty summary of that chapter’s material, and the other two confirmed that it had not been a chapter amenable to skimming and easy extraction. [End Page 103] There are occasionally careless errors, most of which occur in the third chapter. For instance, the author states that the denarius became the only inter-regional currency of the Roman Empire in ad 296 (69), but by then the denarius coin had long disappeared from circulation and remained only a unit of account (e.g., in Diocletian’s Edict of Maximum Prices, ad 301). The assertion that certification stamps on early Lydian electrum pieces limited their acceptability outside their area of origin seems dubious (70): it could easily have done the opposite, by making these coins more valuable than untested electrum nuggets, especially if one supposes that the seigneurage (the issuer’s commission to cover overheads and, possibly, a profit margin too) elevated coins’ face values above their bullion values. Von Reden’s statement that the Seleucids tolerated Attic-weight coins in their realms (84) is curious, given that Seleucid drachmai and tetradrachms were always Attic-weight, as she acknowledges (88). As for simpler errors, most numismatists believe that the denarius was introduced circa 211 bc, not 214 bc (51); the figure of 240,000 Alexander tetradrachms minted between 332 and 290 bc is far too low (82), perhaps by a hundred-fold; arithmetic requires that an average of 5 million, not 50 million, denarii were minted each year between 157 and 80 bc (88); and the word Hellenistc appears (85...