Resumen de The aftermath of the First Mithridatic War and Sulla’s dictatorship: some preliminary historical analyses using the ‘Roman Republic Die Project’
Lucia Carbone, Liv Mariah Yarrow
This paper is based on Richard Schaefer’s archive of Roman republican coin images organized by Crawford number and die. The archive has been digitized by the American Numismatic Society (ANS) and is being released through Archer, the ANS’s archival database and linked to CRRO (Coinage of the Roman Republic Online). The authors of this paper co-direct the Roman Republican Die Project (RRDP) at the ANS, which aims to make Schaefer’s work publicly available and further develop his analyses. Schaefer’s archive and die analyses provide our best data to date for quantifying the size of Roman republican coin issues and testing existing models for extrapolating the total number of original dies from the number of observed dies. The paper briefly introduces Schaefer’s work and the partnership with the ANS to make this work publicly available before demonstrating the potential of the data in two sections focused on different problems of quantification. Section one investigates how we might ?nd a baseline for the quantification of Roman republican issues and present estimates for the size of annual issues for years in which the identity of the college of moneyers is known (RRC 283-285, 299, 335, 350a, and 360-363) or strongly presumed (RRC 382-384). Section two demonstrates how RRDP data (RRC 359/2, 3, and 5) can be combined with our existing knowledge of Athenian New Style tetradrachms and cistophoric production in Asia after Dardanus, as well as literary testimony, in order to meaningfully quantify the scale of Sulla’s resources for his reconquest of Italy.
