Roman Mythical Thought and the Origins of Coinage

In this chapter, Roman money and coinage will be approached through the lens of an unusual and often dismissed set of ancient sources, namely myths. The ancient literary tradition has preserved two distinct groups of mythical tales addressing the origins of Roman coinage from different angles. The tales of the first group were aimed at establishing the “founding father” of Roman bronze coinage, which various authors of the imperial age placed at dramatically different moments of pre-Roman and early Roman history. The second group of myths focused, again in the imperial age, on the meaning of the types that appeared on some very important bronze coins issued from the middle to the late republican age, revealing how Romans of the imperial age perceived coinage and why the production of coins in the Roman republic was placed under the aegis of the goddess Juno Moneta. Though hardly set in a historical and “rational” context, these Roman myths contribute to a richer, thicker understanding of the shared ideas on coinage and on its burgeoning role in Roman imperial society.