What's odd about this hoard, to me, is not only the mixture of gold and silver coins, but the mixture of "proper Roman" and Celtic coins. Which leads me to an interesting possible explanation for the hoard.
The Romans in the early Imperial period did issue both gold and silver coins, but as a general rule, they didn't "mix together" like this - as is evidenced by the fact that the vast amount of Roman coin hoards are either gold coins, or silver coins, but almost never both. This points to gold and silver coins being issued for different people, for different purposes, and therefore rarely getting lost together. So as a general rule, you wouldn't have gone down to the forum with a gold coin, bought a few groceries, and be given a handful of silver and copper coins in change; gold coins simply weren't used to buy groceries, and your typical shopkeeper would be unlikely to have enough silver coins on hand to even give you change, even if he trusted you and your coin.
You couldn't just go down to the bank to swap it; banks hadn't been invented yet. If you had a gold coin and needed to buy groceries with it, you would have needed the services of a moneychanger, to exchange your "useless" gold coin for the far more practical-for-that-purpose silver coins. The moneychanger would of course have charged a fee for this service; the official government exchange rate was 1 gold aureus equals 25 denarii, but he probably would have given you only 23 denarii for your aureus, with the "missing two" being his fee. And if you had a bucketful of denarii and wanted to swap it for gold coins, it might cost you 27 denarii per aureus.
Likewise, moneychangers in the border regions (like the Netherlands) would have also helped a traveller convert their weird foreign money into good Roman money - also for an exorbitant fee. Those debased-gold Celtic coins wouldn't have been much use in the market towns of the Empire, as you'd have had to haggle over what their true value was, and they'd only have been accepted at a steep discount. You'd be better off getting the coins swapped at the moneychanger, even with their steep fees.
So TLDR, what I think we may well have here is a moneychanger's hoard - the collection of gold, silver and foreign coins a moneychanger would have used as his trade inventory.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
Posted 01/30/2025 09:24 am
