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Augustus brought the minting of gold and silver coins, the aureus and denarius, under his personal control while it is thought he left the minting of bronze coinage under senatorial control. [1]
Diocletian soon grew impatient with the city, as the Romans acted towards him with what Edward Gibbon, following Lactantius, calls "licentious familiarity". [197] The Roman people did not give enough deference to his supreme authority; they expected him to act the part of an aristocratic ruler, not a monarchic one.
When the solidus was reintroduced by Constantine I (r. 306–337) in 312 AD, permanently replacing the aureus as the gold coin of the Roman Empire, it was struck at a rate of 72 to a Roman pound of pure gold, each coin weighing twenty-four Greco-Roman carats, or about 4.5 grams of gold per coin.
Roman currency for most of Roman history consisted of gold, silver, bronze, orichalcum and copper coinage. From its introduction during the Republic, in the third century BC, through Imperial times, Roman currency saw many changes in form, denomination, and composition.
In Western Europe, the solidus was the main gold coin of commerce from late Roman times to Pepin the Short's currency reform in the 750s, which introduced the silver-based pound-shilling-penny system. In Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the solidus also functioned as a unit of weight equal to 1 ⁄ 72 Roman pound (approximately 4.5 grams).
The gradual impact of inflation caused by debasement of the silver currency meant that the purchasing power of the sestertius and smaller denominations like the dupondius and as was steadily reduced. In the 1st century AD, everyday small change was dominated by the dupondius and as , but in the 2nd century, as inflation hit, the sestertius became the dominant small change.
In economics, a local currency is a currency not backed by a national government and intended to trade only in a small area. Advocates such as Jane Jacobs argue that this enables an economically depressed region to pull itself up, by giving the people living there a medium of exchange that they can use to exchange services and locally produced goods (in a broader sense, this is the original ...
