Medals as gifts in ancient Rome
By Coinsanduk | Wednesday, 4 February 1998
Roman medals or, as they are usually called, Roman medallions, are not an easy class to define. We can start by saying that they were not. They were not awards for bravery; soldiers in the Roman army were rewarded with decorative discs (phalerae) which could be fixed to their uniform. Nor, indeed, were Roman medals in the modern sense – they were not privately produced metal objects intended to be sold as souvenirs of events like royal coronations or great exhibitions.
Roman medals were – in contrast – officially produced by the State. They were made in the Imperial mint and by the same technique as that used for contemporary coinage – striking a piece of metal from dies (although the quality of die engraving was usually much higher than that for regular coin dies). They were not intended, at least primarily, to be used as currency; their main function was to be presented by the emperor to suitable recipients on suitable occasions.
If we drop the term medallion and just talk about medals we are left with three main categories of Roman medallion:
- Medallions in bronze, made in Rome from about AD 110-350, and principally in the 2nd century AD.
- The contorniates — a modern name — named after their curious edges or rims, which were the direct successors of the bronz e medallions and which were made in Rome from about AD 350 until the fall of the western empire in AD 476/480; some may even have been made subsequently in Ostrogothic Rome in about AD 500.
- So-called money medallions, silver and gold objects much larger than contemporary coins, produced at a variety of mints, and made principally from the mid-3rd century AD onwards, indeed, until well after the fall of the Roman empire.
Bronze medals of the first type were first regularly made in the reign of Hadrian (AD 117-138). They continued to be made for some two centuries, until the middle of the 4th century. Their production, however, was not spread evenly throughout this period, and the most prolific period was in the 2nd century, especially under the emperors Antoninus Pius (138-161), Marcus Aurelius (161-180) and Commodus (180-192). They always have a portrait of the emperor on one side and the reverses generally have a scene drawn from classical mythology, and thereby often make an allusion to some contemporary event.
Common to these examples is an extremely high quality of engraving, rather higher than we find on the contemporary coinage, and there is much greater subtlety or sophistication of design. For example, in the way that the mythological marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne is depicted on the medallions and is used to allude to and celebrate that of Marcus Aurelius to Faustina the Younger, whereas the contemporary coinage shows Marcus and Faustina simply clasping hands with the legend VOT A PVBLICA, public prayers.
The appearance of such symbolism on medals is, perhaps, another indication of the greater sophistication of the audience for which medals were aimed; an audience which might appreciate the polite allusion without taking it seriously at face value. The most common occasion for presentation seems to have been New Year's Day, when it looks as if many medals were produced for the emperor to present to members of his court. Various pieces of evidence favour this view. The first concerns the emperor Commodus, who had the dubious distinction of being murdered on New Year's Eve, AD 192.
Now, Roman emperors held a number of titles, like consul, censor, etc. One of these titles concerned the Tribunician Power, a relic of the long vanished Roman Republic and a power which was renewed every year on 10 December. A very large number of medals — well over 50 are known today — have survived with the title TR P XVIII indicating that they were made in the short period of three weeks between the 10th and the 31st December of 192. In contrast, however, almost no coins were made during that period, so the conclusion seems inescapable that the mint was fully occupied at this period in making medals for the emperor to present on 1 January 192.
If January and other times were the main occasions on which medallions were made they could also perform other functions after their initial gift. For example, quite a lot of Roman medals a re known with holes bored or gouged into them. The reasons for this have always been something of a mystery, but a few years ago one turned up attached in this way to a diploma or certificate of discharge from the army. In a very different way we can see how highly medallions were prized by their owners — for example, in the catacombs in Rome, specimens have been found set into the walls where the remains of their owners were buried. Indeed, it has been thought that a very large proportion of the surviving medallions from Rome, particularly many of those now in the collection of the Vatican Museum, may have originally been recovered from the catacombs.
Contorniates, category 2, are at once alike and unlike medallions. Apart from their edges, they are the same general size and metal, and were also made at the mint of Rome, as rare die links show. But they differ, for example, in design: they rarely show the reigning emperor and, instead sometimes depict former emperors — especially Nero and Trajan (rather odd choices), often in the late antique style — as well as historical figures like Alexander the Great and, interestingly, imaginary portraits of philosophers like Pythagoras or classical writers like Homer, Horace and Sallust. The reverses have a wide variety of scenes from mythology and legend and particularly to contemporary spectacles like gladiatorial shows or horseracing.
We are seeing a very different sort of imagery here, one that is related to victory (Alexander the Great), the games and the arts.
Contorniates probably had more or less the same function as the earlier medallions, although not everyone has thought so. Indeed, Alfoldi himself used to have a bizarre theory that they were tokens of crypto-pagans at a time when the empire had officially converted to Christianity.
Fortunately, this theory was not generally accepted, and one of the more recently discovered pieces has a depiction of the person (Helena) who was not only the mother of the first Christian emperor, Constantine the Great, but herself an ardent Christian. Moreover, not a single piece has been recovered from the Christian catacombs in Rome.
After just over 100 years contorniates died, probably with the fall of the west er n Roma n emp ir e in 480, a nd t he establishment of Ostrogothic rule in the city of Rome from that date, although there is a case for regarding one or two pieces as dating from just after the Ostrogothic take-over.
The third type of Roman medal, objects of precious metal, gold and silver, were, in a sense, multiple coins, since they were struck to fixed weight standards as multiples of so many coins. Early pieces are very rare, and the production of large gold and silver pieces did not become standard until the middle of the 3rd century, because it became increasingly important from that period on for the emperor to secure the loyalty of his regime by transferring large quantities of gold and silver to his military and civilian commanders.
This could, of course, have just been done with lots of ordinary sized coins, but the use of larger pieces allowed a greater flamboyance and explicitness in the gesture, conferring greater status on the recipient. These gold and silver medallions follow the weight standards of ordinary coins, and often use a similar visual vocabulary but, while they undoubtedly did have a monetary value, their role as objects of exchange derived only from their previous metal content and seems secondary to their role as objects for presentation.
We can see this in two ways. First of all, other non-coin-like objects were made, often at the imperial mint, for presentation; these might include silver candle - sticks and bowls, or objects made of gold such as belt buckles, leaves, crowns and brooches. The second way in which we can see how these pieces had a presentational function is the explicit and almost only literary reference we have about them. This records how the early Byzantine emperor Tiberius II (578-582) presented to the ambassadors of the Frankish king Chilperic two gold medallions each weighing 72 gold solidi or one Roman pound of gold. Chilperic later showed these to Gregory of Tours who describes them in his Historia Francorum:
He showed me the gold medals which the emperor had sent, each of which weighed one pound and had on one side a portrait depicting the emperor and an inscription in a circle TIBERII CONSTANTINNI PERPETVI AVGVSTI and on the other side a four-horse chariot containing a passenger and the inscription GLORIA ROMANORVM
- Hist Franc VI.2
These pieces do not survive, nor do any of such a colossal size, save for the Justinian I medallion (stolen from the Paris collection in 1831), but many of these late imperial medallions hav e been found beyond the frontiers of the empire (even as far afield as Norway). It is clear that they performed an important diplomatic function as part of the bribes paid by late Roman and early Byzantine emperors to the barbarian tribes outside the empire in the effort to stop attacks being made on the empire.
The occasions of issue within the empire were many — the accession of a new emperor, the anniversary of an emperor's accession, an Imperial visit, an Imperial consulship, a notable victory, and so on. These bribes, or to give them their contemporary and more neutral name, `donatives', played an important part in maintaining the political and social structure of the Late Roman Empire.
We can reconstruct some of the detail of the way in which they were given out b y looking at the Arras hoard fr om norther n Fra nce, deposited in about 315. It shows how its owner had been the recipient of donatives for some 20 years, receiving medallions on the occasion of several imperial accessions and, most spectacularly, on the occasion of the recovery of Britain from the usurpers Carausius and Allectus in 296.
Unlike the bronze medallions and contorniates whose production was confined to the mint at Rome, the gold and silver pieces were made at all mints producing gold coins. This more dispersed production does in fact reflect the way that, increasingly in the later empire, the minting of gold coins tended to take place wherever the emperor happened to be, since the emperors were keen to keep the empire's stocks of gold safe with them rather than at the mercy of others in some central storage depository.
Both this geographically dispersed production and the more general role of medals as a means of maintaining loyalty at home and abroad explain why their production continued well after the fall of the western Roman empire at the end of the fifth century.
