By Alice Sharpless for American Numismatic Society (ANS) ……
Another batch of Roman Republican coin types has just been released to the Roman Republican Die Project (RRDP). The new release significantly expands the time period of issues that have been processed, since it includes early Republican didrachms (Fig. 1), as well as late Republican aurei of Octavian and Antony (Fig. 2).
The new release includes the following RRC types:
The didrachm RRC 15/1 had already been processed in RRDP but was revised as part of the current release so that all specimens in Coinage of the Roman Republic Online (CRRO) have now been analyzed and appear in the die pages.
This release includes issues that were processed with the assistance of students at Sapienza Università di Roma as part of an internship supervised by Lucia Carbone, Andrew M. Burnett Associate Curator of Roman Numismatics. The subtypes of RRC 366/1 were transcribed by Isobel Wilkes (366/1a) and Micol Mazzoli (366/1b and 366/1c).
Numismatist Michael Crawford distinguished the three subtypes based on the control marks: obverse symbol (366/1a), obverse letter flanked by dots (366/1b), and reverse letter usually followed by a dot (366/1c). For 366/1a, Crawford lists 27 control symbols (RRC, Table XXXI). Richard Schaefer, however, identified only 23 dies, with one additional die provided by CRRO specimens producing a total of 24.
The RRDP dies do not include the comb, spear, or thyrsus listed by Crawford. It is likely that these three symbols–the first of which Crawford only knew from Ernest Babelon (Annia 2)–were actually confused with other symbols. The dies identified as spear and thyrsus could have been worn specimens of the arrow or sword in scabbard, while the symbol Babelon identified as a comb could have been the syrinx.
For 366/1b, Schaefer has identified a die with each letter of the Latin alphabet, except H. For 366/1c, Crawford only knew of two reverse dies, with letters A (no dot) and B (with dot). Schaefer has added a third die with the letter C followed by a dot, known only from a single specimen (Fig. 3).
RRC 313/1a, which is distinguished by having no control mark, and 313/1b, which has an obverse control mark, were transcribed by Francesco Paratico, another student at Sapienza Università di Roma. Paratico also carried out his own die study on the reverse, which had not been analyzed by Schaefer. RRC 313/1c, which has reverse control marks, has not yet been processed.
The control marks of 313/1b form five groups, based on the Latin alphabet: letter alone, letter with dot above, letter with dot below, letter with dot before (Fig. 4), and letter with dot after. For the most part, this issue is ODEC: One Die for Every Control-Mark, meaning there is only one die with any given control mark. Some control marks, however, are duplicated on two or three dies. Accidental duplication is common, however the number of duplicate control marks suggests either that the issue was not intended to be strictly ODEC, or that there was little quality control.
We do not currently know the striking order of the dies, or of the various control mark systems, but the die links could provide insight into this.
The reverse dies of this type point to a high variability in organization of the production of this type. Nearly half (48%) of the 148 reverse dies are linked to only one obverse die, while 28% are linked to two obverse dies, 12% to three dies, 7% to four, 3% to five, and 1% to six. Only two reverses are linked to six different obverse dies: Paratico RRC 313/1 Reverse 1019 and Paratico RRC 313/1 Reverse 1026.
What is interesting is that, even when a reverse die is linked to only two obverses, the control marks only sometimes fall into the same group. When reverse dies are linked to several obverses, the control marks can show great variation. For example, Paratico RRC 313/1 Reverse 1026 is linked to control marks P, Ḅ, G̣, Ḳ, Ġ, and K̇.
There is some indication that the obverse dies were struck, at least to some degree, in alphabetical order within each group, since some reverse dies link control marks in order, such as Paratico RRC 313/1 Reverse 1027, which is linked to control marks P and Q (Figs. 5-6) as well as Ȧ and Ḃ. This is only a very preliminary analysis, but a thorough study of the die links could tell us much more about the organization of the production of this issue.
The early Roman Republican didrachm and drachm coins, the bronzes of the Staff and Club series (RRC 106), and the aurei of Octavian and Antony that are included in this release will be the topics of papers presented by Andrew Burnett, Andrew McCabe, and Wilhelm Hollstein at the RRDP conference at the American Academy in Rome on April 9-11, 2025.
* * *
* * *
