Coins with only mention of Roman “emperor” authenticated

November 25, 2022 1:52 PM

Coins that are the only evidence of the historicity of the otherwise unrecorded Roman so-called emperor Sponsian have been found to be authentic 3rd century issues. The history of these coins is sketchy and there are some stylistic anomalies that have cast doubt on their authenticity since they first emerged in 1713. Plus, they portray an alleged emperor that appears nowhere else on the historical or archaeological record.
posted by Etrigan (27 comments total)

Render under Somebody or Another what is Caesar's -- or Vice Versa ...for the time being.
posted by y2karl at 2:19 PM on November 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

Good stuff! The base-line PLOS One peer-review paper is freely available and lays out the evidence in exhaustive detail. Real coins tended to be struck from engraved dies but forgeries were more likely cast from molds made of real coins, for example. The questionable coins seem to be cast. It's not so surprising the Emperor Sponsian fell out of the historical record. Sophocles was recorded as having written 123 plays of which only 7 have come down to us. So written documentation about a local warlord could easily have gone up in smoke or used to wrap cheese.
posted by BobTheScientist at 2:33 PM on November 25, 2022 [7 favorites]

I heard about that and was intrigued. Had never heard of the coin before, but if you were going to pick a century for an otherwise-unknown Imperator to show up, issue coinage, and disappear... well, the 3rd century wouldn't be the least likely time. And seconding what BobTheScientist said about disappearing sources--we have a sliver of a sliver of a sliver left today.
posted by cupcakeninja at 2:36 PM on November 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

Agreed cupcakeninja, the third century was really chaotic, not surprising a whole emperor could fall through the cracks.
posted by supermedusa at 2:39 PM on November 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

Interesting! Maybe this could be an excessively effective use of damnatio memoriae?
posted by kaelynski at 3:24 PM on November 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

The only other time in my life I've seen the phrase damnatio memoriae was THIS MORNING in Ada Palmer's Perhaps the Stars. WTF, universe.
posted by seanmpuckett at 3:35 PM on November 25, 2022 [5 favorites]

Looks like Emperor Jughead.
posted by Mister Moofoo at 4:01 PM on November 25, 2022 [8 favorites]

Metafilter: used to wrap cheese.
posted by Hairy Lobster at 4:14 PM on November 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

I learned damnatio memoriae from studying ancient Egypt! People think of Egypt as changeless, but it had some rough patches in its history, and there are a number of spurious pharaohs turning up, people who may or may not have been kings (or queens regnant). Maybe we don't understand the record, or maybe they were trying to make it true when it wasn't yet.
posted by Countess Elena at 4:17 PM on November 25, 2022 [3 favorites]

It sounds like the theory is that Sponsian was basically a Dacian warlord rather than a "real" emperor. Dacia was a remote province that got cut off from Rome during the 260s and lost access to the imperial money supply. Sponsian, as a local military commander, would have minted his own coins to pay his officers and officials -- "a monetary stimulus that might have prevented the local economy from collapse as well as avoiding military revolt."

Maybe proclaiming himself emperor was a way of asserting authority in a chaotic situation? I don't know if it necessarily means he wanted to take over the rest of the Empire (there were plenty of other candidates for that job!). The article actually suggests that Sponsian may have commanded the Dacian legions that had remained loyal to Rome during the 250s, so perhaps he was also trying to maintain some semblance of continuity with the Empire as things broke down. Rome ended up officially withdrawing from Dacia altogether in the early 270s.

Anyway, super interesting article, thanks for sharing!
posted by Gerald Bostock at 4:22 PM on November 25, 2022 [16 favorites]

Maybe in a couple thousand years, some future archaeologist will unearth one of those Donald Trump commemorative coins. Who's gonna be laughing then???
posted by abraxasaxarba at 5:40 PM on November 25, 2022 [6 favorites]

A brain in a vat.
posted by y2karl at 5:52 PM on November 25, 2022 [4 favorites]

One of the stranger details of this story concerns the reverse side of one of the Sponsian profile coins:

Among the four coins from the wider assemblage now in the collection of The Hunterian is one featuring the unknown “emperor” Sponsian. It is designed in the style of coins from the mid third century, but the design on the reverse is a copy of a Republican-era silver coin from the 1st century B.C. That reverse design would have been close to 400 years old when the Sponsian coin was made.

Whoever made this coin had access to a 400 year old coin that he used as a model.

Who would have possessed such a coin under the circumstances, and why was it used as a model?

The only plausible scenario I could think of was that Sponsian himself possessed the coin because he traced his line back to the Emperor of the time when the coin was struck, and that he used it as a model because a reference to such distinguished ancestry strengthened his claim to be Emperor.

Which might mean that he had ambitions that went beyond merely stabilizing the government of a marginal province.
posted by jamjam at 6:09 PM on November 25, 2022 [4 favorites]

Or since the passage I quoted specifies it came from Republican times, that he traced his ancestry back to an important Patrician family of that period.
posted by jamjam at 6:18 PM on November 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

Or he had romantic ideas about the Republic and happened to have a Republican coin that was in surprisingly good shape?
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 6:38 PM on November 25, 2022 [3 favorites]

Maybe in a couple thousand years, some future archaeologist will unearth one of those Donald Trump commemorative coins. Who's gonna be laughing then???

Amos Burton
posted by stevis23 at 9:52 PM on November 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

For propaganda, you'd expect some writing on the reverse. Common enough in coins of that period.

Pity neither article showed an example of the original Republican coin on which this was based.
posted by BWA at 5:12 AM on November 26, 2022

Interesting! Maybe this could be an excessively effective use of damnatio memoriae?

More likely he was just in charge of Dacia, which got cut off from the rest of the Empire in the chaos that was the Crisis of 3rd Century and was just accidentally forgotten as Dacia was evacuated towards the end of the crisis. Not an intentional forgetting as a punishment, but an accident where information was lost in the chaos.
posted by jmauro at 7:36 AM on November 26, 2022

For propaganda, you'd expect some writing on the reverse. Common enough in coins of that period.

It was thought to be a forgery, because it's so different from the other coins of that era. Weight, design, cast instead of stamped, etc.
posted by jmauro at 7:39 AM on November 26, 2022

I love the History blog and found that story really interesting when I saw it. If you're into ancient and medieval history/archaeology, the blog the OP comes from is worth your time.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 7:43 AM on November 26, 2022

maybe he was a mascot for a family fun time restaurant like chuck e cheese and the coin was really a game token
posted by Saxon Kane at 10:13 AM on November 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

The E does not stand for Emperor.
posted by Etrigan at 11:35 AM on November 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

Pity neither article showed an example of the original Republican coin on which this was based

It looks as though these are the two Republican coins that were copied by Sponsian: denarius of C. Minucius Augurinus, 135 BCE, and denarius of L. Plautius Plancus, 47 BCE. I guess if you were a Roman commander gone rogue in 3rd-century Dacia, it would make sense to give yourself more credibility by minting coins that looked as authentically Roman as possible.

I liked this little snippet from the article on how coin forgers did their stuff:

We are told, for instance, that to achieve a realistic and even wear pattern, the notorious nineteenth century forger Wilhelm Becker (1772–1830) placed his fake productions in a box full of iron filings and attached to the axle of his carriage.

It seems the main reason for thinking the Sponsian coins are authentic is that they turned up on the market in 1713, when forgeries weren't so sophisticated (and when nobody knew that Sponsian was a genuine Roman name, so there was no reason for a forger to have invented it). If they'd been discovered fifty years later it would be much harder to rule out the forgery hypothesis, even with modern scientific analysis.
posted by verstegan at 7:06 PM on November 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

This article just appeared on my feed making a strong case that the Sponsian coin is a bad fake.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 8:59 AM on November 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

Thank you, TheophileEscargot; that's very interesting. I see there's also been some debate in the Guardian: a sceptical comment from a curator at the British Museum, and a spirited response from the lead author of the original article.

Basically what it comes down to is that the Sponsian coins are really badly made. If you think they're forgeries, you say: 'no authentic coins could be this bad!'. If you think they're authentic, you say: 'no forgeries could be this bad!' So the same evidence can be made to run in either direction.

To me, the strongest argument for forgery is that no other examples of the Sponsian coins have been discovered since 1713. Even the original article has to admit that this is 'one of the more compelling reasons they have been regarded as fakes'.
posted by verstegan at 12:05 PM on November 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

Apart from all the design details, this was the bit that makes me very skeptical:

But there is more evidence which condemns the coin further. This is provided by its very fabric. The small circular holes which pepper the obverse are familiar to all coin collectors who have examined forgeries. These are the traces of relict bubbles caused in the casting process. Unlike all authentic Roman coins, this coin is cast in a mould, not struck between two dies. Bizarrely, such a production method makes Pearson interpret this as a unique innovation, rejecting the far more obvious conclusion that it is a modern forgery.

Striking coins is pretty simple technology, even the petty kings of post-Roman Britain were able to do it. But it's really hard to believe that a peripheral emperor's staff invented a brand new process which then just got lost again till the modern era.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 12:28 PM on November 27, 2022

However this works out, 'Sponsian' makes for a good adjective.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:29 AM on November 28, 2022