1The role of the Roman military system in the spread of Roman coinage in Italy in the third century BC is clear.1 What is much less clear is the range of mechanisms by which Italy continued - or did not continue - to be supplied with coinage in the second and first centuries; it is these mechanisms that I should like to discuss.

2But first a word about the third century, largely to draw attention to a book whose unassuming exterior conceals its true importance.2 Andrew Burnett has there drawn attention to the exiguous scale of early Roman issues of silver, both as compared to those of the cities of Magna Graecia and certainly as compared to those of her Carthaginian enemy in the same period. The demand for men around which Rome articulated her alliances in Italy explains the absence of coinage at Rome before the very end of the fourth century; for although Roman soldiers were paid a stipendium, by weight, from the time of the siege of Veii onwards and bullion levied from defeated enemies to fund the pay, the phenomenon was evidently marginal. Similarly, the numismatic history of the third century makes it clear that it is only with the issue of quadrigatus coinage from 225 that Rome produced enough pieces to serve as a coinage for the peninsula of Italy. The levy of that year involved in fact the monetisation of the military structures of Roman Italy. And it is in the period between the First and Second Punic Wars that coinage of any kind, whether of Rome or of the cities of Magna Graecia, penetrates for the first time into Appennine Italy.3

3If we turn to the period after the Second Punic War, it is at once obvious that all coinage other than Roman disappeared for all pratical purposes from circulation with great rapidity.4 But that only sharpens our problem, how coinage struck and for the most part paid out by the state at Rome was diffused to the rest of Italy.

4Let us begin with the distribution of hoards of Roman silver in Italy with terminal dates between 146 and the Social War.5 (See fig. 1) What stands out is the complete absence of any hoards from Etruria. The explanation is less obvious. Naturally the fact is not immediately to be equated with the absence of coinage. But given that the pattern of hoards in Etruria after the outbreak of the Social War is the same as elsewhere, it seems reasonable to prospect the hypotheses either that before that date Etruria hardly used Roman coinage or that the reasons which elsewhere caused hoards to be buried and not recovered did not apply; or indeed both. And we shall see that the explanation I offer accounts for both possibilities.

5The explanation cannot be that Roman roads and the no doubt by now in part commercial traffic which used them were largely responsible for the diffusion of Roman coinage, but failed to diffuse it in Etruria. For the region was traversed by a perfectly good road, the Via Cassia, built in the second century.

6Nor may we invoke a different pattern of land-holding by the Roman elite, which might have transmitted coinage to other areas, but not to Etruria. If we look, by way of example, at the estates of Roman senators in Italy in the late Republic,6 it is in any case clear that the vast majority of those attested fall into two categories, those serving for villeggiatura and those close to Rome, often inherited and often serving for the production of luxuries for Roman tables. If we look at those which remain, which we might suppose to form a source of wealth to their owners, it is not obvious that Etruria is untypical, with the probable estates of Corvinus at Arretium to be set beside those of Verres at Beneventum or Cocceius Nerva at Caudium.

7Certainly the wealth of Appennine Italy in the generation before the Social War was considerable, serving to build the sanctuaries for which the area is famous and in due course to finance the war. But the sources of this wealth will not in themselves have supplied the area with Roman coinage; for the activities of men of business in the east were notoriously not carried on in denarii. As far as Italy is concerned, payment for hides and suchlike for the army will have been made in Rome and not necessarily transmitted to the areas where they were produced; and the products of pastoralism in general will often have been sold in the lowlands. In any case it is not obvious why neither of these processes seems to be reflected in the presence of coin hoards in Etruria.

8I suspect that as earlier the principle vehicle for the diffusion of coinage in Italy was the service of officers and men from Italy in the armies that fought for Rome.7 It is this service that lies behind the fact that the military organisation of the rebels in 91 involved the production of their own coinage, though this naturally served ideological ends at the same time.

9And I wonder whether the social structure of Etruria, its lower orders between slave and free rather than free peasants, meant that few soldiers were recruited there before the Social War.8 Hence perhaps little Roman coinage. And little Etruscan blood to dye the foreign battlefields of Rome, those who had spilt it not return to recover the wealth they had buried before their departure.9 Contrast only the density of coin hoards in Picenum, by our period largely Roman or Latin territory apart from Asculum, and at all times a major recruiting ground for the armies of Rome. No wonder the Etruscans, along with what was still independent of neighbouring Umbria, did not join the rebels in 91. They had no soldiers.