Sacra Moneta?
For most of their circulating lives, Roman coins were not treated as religious objects,
despite the fact that they were often decorated with images of gods, emperors, and
other symbols of Roman religion and cult. Indeed, coins were typically described in
legal contexts as public things, not sacred. What made them into legitimate currency
was that they were marked with “the public type of the Roman people” (forma
publica populi Romani). This formula meant not just that the coins had been made
in the public mint. It also implies that the designs chosen to represent the public
type were part of what made the coins public currency, and identified them as Roman.
From the lituusof the late republic to the cross of late antiquity, religion continued
to supply most of the key motifs that constituted the public type. The promin-
ence of religious coin designs persisted, despite significant changes in religion itself,
surviving even the change from paganism to Christianity, manifesting the abiding
significance of religion in the articulation of the Roman civic identity. Coins were
one of the most deliberate symbols in antiquity of public identity (Millar 1993a:
230); to which, the coins reveal, religion was utterly fundamental.FURTHER READINGThe best introduction to Roman coinage in English is Burnett (1987). For a good intro-
duction to the interpretation of coins in a wider context, see Howgego (1995). The quick-
est way to get a sense of the range and frequency of religious symbols on coins is to start
with the catalogues. Roman republican coinage is discussed and fully illustrated in Crawford’s
seminal Roman Republican Coinage(RRC) (1974). For the imperial period, the key works,
both started by Harold Mattingly in 1923, are the catalogue of the British Museum collec-
tion (BMC), Coins from the Roman Empire in the British Museum(6 vols., London, 1923–),
which goes up toad 238, and the series Roman Imperial Coinage(RIC) (10 vols., London,
1923–94), which covers everything down toad 491 but is less comprehensively illustrated.
For the hugely informative, mostly base-metal coinages produced by cities in the Roman
provinces, see the ongoing series Roman Provincial Coinage(RPC) (Andrew M. Burnett
et al. eds., London 1993–) which is also fully illustrated.
Religion and Roman Coins 163