Some Roman head coppers

logger7

I was going through the collection of Byzantine coins and found these Roman heads. Mediocre at best, some env. damage.

Anyone want to ID these emperors?

tcollects

how many hundreds of years did those circulate?

logger7

@tcollects said:
how many hundreds of years did those circulate?

Good question and it speaks to their cultural significance. When did they stop getting exchanged as money? In the New World would they have had any value along side the Colonial coppers, etc.?

Sapyx

They would have "stopped circulating" once inflation made them worth more in metal value than face value - which would have been some time in the mid-200s AD, as the value of the denarius collapsed under the weight of the Romans constantly losing wars for a change. At which point, any such coins redeemed or remaining in government hands would have been melted down and reissued as higher-face-value coins. So the only survivors would be coins that got buried; if "coin collectors" existed back then, there's essentially no evidence for them and they played no part in preserving coins for us.

On top of this, coins of unpopular or politically incorrect Roman emperors would be withdrawn and deliberately destroyed long before they had the chance to get worn slick. In extreme cases, this was as a result of a damnatio memoriae - an official erasure from history, including destruction of all coins in their name. It is no coincidence that all of these heavily worn coins shown above were from "Golden Age" emperors - Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius - emperors that not only reigned a long time, but were regarded by all their successors as divine and "good".

However, on occasion Roman coins did get a "second life", circulating long after they were officially withdrawn. In the case of bronzes, any such coins dug up in Britain during the coin shortage of the late 1700s were apparently cleaned up a bit by whoever found them and then put right back into circulation, alongside the various tokens, foreign coins and whatnot that made up the coinage of the day. The Romans were of course long gone and nobody was left who would officially exchange their dupondii and sestertii for pounds and shillings, but people needed coins more than they needed government backing. If a dupondius was about the same size as a halfpenny, it was reckoned as a halfpenny and circulated as such. It helped that British coins, quite by deliberate design intent, looked quite similar to ancient Roman coins, right down to the British kings usually wearing a Roman-style laurel wreath - so a Roman coin often looked more "offical-looking" than many of the private tokens being made. This is the explanation for at least some of the anceitn ROman bronzes that look like your third coin - a coin which has clear signs of modern wear and circulation.

Such coins might have made their way into "circulation" in the Americas and elsewhere in the British Empire via the pockets of immigrants, but unlike coins and tokens, they wouldn't have officially been imported to the colonies.

By the mid-1800s, of course, the rise of antiquarinaism meant that more and more people were beginning to see value in ancient coins beyond their mere utilitarian "face value", marking the end of the likelihood of finding a Roman coin in everyday change.