Why Are Ancient Roman Coins So Cheap?

Short answer: because there are an enormous number of them. Rome minted coin on an industrial scale for over six centuries, a society without banks buried its savings in the ground where they were preserved, and modern discovery has released hundreds of thousands of genuine coins onto the market. Age has no bearing on price. Supply does, and the supply of common Roman coins is vast.

It is one of the most pleasant surprises in collecting. A visitor to a coin fair expects a two-thousand-year-old artefact to be an unreachable luxury and discovers a tray of genuine Roman bronzes at £8 each. The explanation runs through Roman economics, Roman anxiety, and the last forty years of metal detecting.

1. Rome minted on a scale nothing else in the ancient world approached

The Roman state needed coin in quantities that are hard to picture. It paid a standing professional army of a quarter of a million men, in cash, several times a year (Duncan-Jones, 1994). It funded a bureaucracy, a road network, a grain dole for the city of Rome, and a building programme across three continents. It collected taxes in coin, which meant it had to put enough coin into circulation for taxpayers to pay them.

Meeting that demand meant mints running continuously, in Rome and later at a network of regional centres from London to Antioch, each divided into multiple workshops striking simultaneously. Dies were cut by hand and wore out fast, so a single issue could consume hundreds of die pairs — and each die pair could strike many thousands of coins before it failed. Multiply that across six centuries and the arithmetic runs into the billions (Harl, 1996).

2. A society with no banks buried its money

This is the part that matters most for survival. Ordinary Romans had no deposit account. If you had savings, you kept them physically, and if you were worried — an invasion, a civil war, a journey, a rebellion — you put them in a pot and buried them.

Most people came back for their money. The ones who did not, because they died or fled or never returned, left their savings sealed underground in exactly the state they were buried. That is why Roman coins survive not as scattered stray losses but as hoards (Abdy, 2002) — coherent groups of hundreds or thousands of coins, often in excellent condition because they were withdrawn from circulation and protected from the air.

The pattern is legible in the archaeology. Hoard deposition spikes during periods of insecurity, and the 3rd century — civil war, invasion, plague and monetary collapse — produced burial on a scale that still dominates the modern market (Reece, 2002). A great many of the affordable antoniniani sold today come out of that anxious half-century.

3. Debasement made the problem worse, and the supply larger

As the silver content of the coinage collapsed through the 3rd century, people did what people always do with bad money: they spent it and hoarded the good stuff. The state responded by striking ever more of the debased coin to cover its obligations, and the volume of low-value billon and bronze produced in that period was extraordinary (Metcalf, 2012). Those are precisely the coins that fill the cheap trays today. The full story of that collapse is in our piece on how the denarius lost its silver.

4. Modern discovery changed the supply curve

Two developments moved a large body of material from the ground to the market within living memory. Affordable metal detectors from the 1970s onwards made systematic searching possible across northern Europe, where Roman sites are widespread and agricultural land is accessible. And the opening of eastern Europe and the Balkans in the 1990s brought a further large flow of material — including a great deal without documented findspots, which is the origin of the provenance problems the trade still works through (UNESCO, 1970) and which we address in our guide to the law.

5. Demand is finite

Supply is only half of a price. Ancient numismatics is a specialist field with a collector base numbering in the tens of thousands worldwide, not the millions. When you set that against hundreds of thousands of surviving common coins, the market clears at a low price. This is exactly the same reason a mass-market first-edition novel can be worth less than a scarce modern pamphlet.

Which Roman coins are not cheap, and why

Supply within the Roman series is wildly uneven, and every expensive Roman coin is expensive for one of these reasons:

• Gold. An aureus was 25 denarii — three or four weeks' wages (Burnett, 1987). Few people had them, fewer buried them, and the survivors were often melted. Bullion value sets a floor beneath the numismatic value.
• Short reigns and small mints. An emperor who ruled for eleven weeks from a provincial capital simply did not produce much.
• Condition. Millions of a type may survive; a handful survive with a full strike, good centring and original surfaces.
• Historical moment. Coins tied to famous events carry demand out of all proportion to their scarcity.
• Provenance. Documented ownership history is itself a priced commodity now.

What this means if you are starting out

The cheapness of common Roman coins is an opportunity, but it comes with two traps.

The first is uncleaned lots. Marketed on the promise of discovery, they are usually the residue after dealers have removed anything identifiable. Buy them for the conservation practice, not for the odds.

The second is the packaged coin. A common late Roman bronze worth £10 becomes a £45 product once it is placed in a presentation box with a certificate. The coin is genuine and the markup is entirely in the packaging.

The better use of a modest budget is to spend the same money on one considerably better coin. A £120 denarius with a full legend, a sharp portrait and clean silver surfaces will give more pleasure and hold its value far better than eight £15 bronzes, and it teaches you more about what quality looks like — which is the skill everything else in collecting depends on.

You can hold, for the price of a takeaway, a coin that passed through the hands of someone who lived under Diocletian. That this is possible at all is one of the quiet marvels of the field.

Frequently asked questions

Are Roman coins actually rare?

As a class, no. Roman coins survive in very large numbers because Rome minted on an industrial scale for centuries and because a society without banks buried its savings, preserving whole hoards intact. Individual types can be genuinely rare, but the idea that any Roman coin must be rare because it is old does not hold.

How can a coin be 1,800 years old and cost £15?

Because price follows the balance of supply and demand, not age. Hundreds of thousands of Roman coins are in circulation among collectors and dealers, and common late Roman bronzes exist in enormous quantity. At that supply level, a genuine ancient coin costs about what a paperback does.

If cheap Roman coins are genuine, why are some so expensive?

Because supply within the Roman series is extremely uneven. A common bronze of Constantine and a gold aureus of a short-lived usurper are both Roman, but one survives in the millions and the other in single figures. Condition compounds the effect: the same type can differ in price by a factor of fifty between worn and superb.

Should I buy cheap Roman coins as an investment?

No. Inexpensive coins are wonderful to own and to learn from, but their prices are anchored by abundant supply and they carry the same transaction costs as anything else — you buy at retail and sell at a wholesale discount. Buy them because holding Roman history in your hand for the price of a meal is remarkable, which it genuinely is.

References

• Abdy, R.A. (2002) Romano-British Coin Hoards. Princes Risborough: Shire Publications.
• Burnett, A. (1987) Coinage in the Roman World. London: Seaby.
• Duncan-Jones, R. (1994) Money and Government in the Roman Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Harl, K.W. (1996) Coinage in the Roman Economy, 300 B.C. to A.D. 700. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Metcalf, W.E. (ed.) (2012) The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Coinage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Reece, R. (2002) The Coinage of Roman Britain. Stroud: Tempus.
• UNESCO (1970) Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. Paris: UNESCO.

Referencing follows the Harvard (author–date) system. Where figures are given as approximate ranges, they are drawn from the works above; published analyses differ by mint, issue and method, and market figures reflect prices observed at the date of writing.