The previous subsections investigated the temporal signature of the phenomenon here examined, the violent death of emperors, a spectacle of brutality and violence not unlike the gladiatorial games, except it stretched over four centuries and affected the entire Roman world (Millar, 1977).
This work began in jest by comparing Roman emperors with gladiators, and it noted that the odds of survival of the former were worse than those of the latter. There is perhaps more to this comparison than meets the eye. There was a particular appeal to gladiatorial games in the Roman world (Fagan, 2011). Whatever its reasonsFootnote 10, it is undeniable that these games offered a spectacle of extreme brutality, like an unscripted theatrical play with violence as the main protagonist, and gladiators the creative agents of its delivery. Roman emperors performed in similar games, except instead of delivering their role in single afternoon, they took several years, sometimes only a few months to complete it before they were dismissed from the stage. They also faced more diverse hazards, and stealthier adversaries than those encountered by the gladiators in the arena. Incidentally, the emperor Commodus would blur the line of this analogy and go down into the arena and fight gladiators (as well as wild beats).
The Roman Emperor Aurelian : Restorer of the World download pdf
The minting of gold coins in the Roman Empire was highly centralised, almost always occurring at Rome or, under exceptional circumstances, with the emperor when he was on campaign. However there seems to have been a severe gold crisis in the mid-third century, possibly resulting from reduced output from the mines together with the loss of huge amounts of gold from the treasury, first as an indemnity to the Persians in 244 CE (reviewed in Ref. [1]), and then captured by the Goths at the Battle of Abritus in 251 [1, 54, 55]. It has been noticed that finds of individual stray aurei from the 250s onward become comparatively rare [31, 56], and the weight of individual coins, which had previously been very carefully controlled, began to fluctuate considerably [2, 56]. Nevertheless a very high level of purity was maintained, possibly because merchants across the ancient world were able to detect impurities with surprising accuracy using a simple scratch test [57]. All these factors suggest that after 251 CE, gold became used as bullion, as a means of payment for the elite and a haven of wealth, rather than as an everyday means of exchange against silver and bronze. Meanwhile, inflation became rampant in the wider economy and the silver coinage was rapidly debased [58, 59] so the intrinsic value of silver would also have become detached from the face value of the coinage.
Regular Roman coins were made in large secure mint factories by striking pre-prepared blanks between officially sanctioned dies [61]. The dies were made of tough alloys and could be used tens of thousands of times before wearing out. The standard of die engraving was very high because the coins were propaganda tools that reflected the prestige of the emperor and, presumably, also as a security measure to prevent counterfeiting. Nevertheless, unofficial minting and forgery occurred throughout the ancient world and took various forms at different times and for different reasons [34]. 2ff7e9595c
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