I'm home sick today, so this post sent me down a rabbit hole learning more about this coin, and Roman minting practices in general. Here is what I have learned:
- I was curious about the legends on the coin:
- The reverse (tails side) obviously says EID MAR (=eidus martiae = Ides of March). Strong start, shows that the Ides of March was as much a distinctive anniversary in its own time as it is today.
- The obverse (heads side) has BRVT IMP (=Brutus imperator = Brutus the general). Note that imperator does not mean emperor at this stage, it's simply a title for those who lead armies.
But what is the slightly obscured inscription on the left? Took me a while to dig it up because neither the Wikipedia page nor the excited news stories about how much the coin sold for were interested. I finally found it buried in this page:
L PLAET CEST (=Lucius Plaetorius Cestianus) - the name of the moneyer who minted the coin.
...ok I had been hoping it was a little more interesting than that. But that leads into:
2. What was the situation with minting coins at Rome? What was a moneyer anyway? (Sources 1, 2, 3)
The mint at Rome was known as the moneta, and the men in charge of it were the tresviri monetales (the three men in charge of the mint). This is typically translated as "moneyer" but I saw suggested that it would be more accurate to call them "mint magistrates" because they were hardly out their striking coins personally. These were minor elected (or possibly appointed) officials, typically younger members from senatorial families who were taking their first steps into public life.
2a. The moneta was so-called because it was attached to the temple of Juno Moneta (not uncommon - the state treasury was attached to the temple of Saturn). The name of Juno Moneta seems to have unclear origins (1, 2), but may have originally been linked to the verb monere, to warn or advise. This later came to mean simply 'money', whence we get monetary and so on.
Maybe if Caesar had heeded the monitum about the Ides of March, there later wouldn't have been moneta about the Ides of March.
3. At first Roman coins were minted in a relatively uniform way as is common in Greek cities; as time went on the tresviri started adding their own flairs to them to signify the moneyer, their families and their patrons. Great quote from Wikipedia:
The coinage of the Roman Republic changed dramatically in 139 BC after the vote of the lex Gabinia, which provided secret ballots for the elections of magistrates. The nobility could no longer use their traditional means of influencing the crowd, and ambitious individuals started to use coinage for self-advertisement.
"Oh no, we can't use our *traditional means* of influencing votes (intimidation) any more!!!"
So as a young moneyer, you might put an image of a famous ancestor or event from your family history on the coins, maybe a god who your family was associated with - or something similar for your powerful patron. You could also put your name on there to start getting some name recognition - gotta start greasing the wheels for your glorious political career. Our boy Lucius was most likely a client of Brutus' (especially given that the Junia gens was an ancient consular family, whereas the Plaetoria gens seems to have rarely made it past quaestor).
These became more explicit as time went on, eventually leading to Julius Caesar himself being the first living Roman have his head on a coin. This coin obviously follows this tradition by depicting Marcus Junius Brutus himself (instead of, for example, his famous ancestor who was also a tyrannicide). This became the norm under the emperors, where the majority of coins had the head of the emperor himself (occasionally family members). Over this period the individual tresviri lost the ability to choose what they wanted to put on their coins.
This puts this coin at an interesting crossroads: it has both the head of a living man in true monarchic fashion, and the name of the minor official who organised the minting. What a fantastic encapsulation of the last gasps of the Roman Republic!
