The theme is so alluring, that it is quite surprising that it has not before been taken up; and it would be pleasing to report that it has here at last been successfully treated; but honesty alas forbids. The brief of the contributors, originally of papers for the Ninth Celtic Conference in Classics in 2016, was to show the importance of numismatic evidence for the period. Hence a tendency in all the papers to push the evidence to and beyond the limit.

But first some general points: many of the contributors address themselves to what the reaction of those who looked at the coins might have been; but did anyone succeed in looking at them? There is first the difficulty that many individual Republican and age-of-revolution denarii are poorly struck, with parts of the legends and even of the types off the edge of the flan, a phenomenon exemplified by many of the figures in the book. In this context, anyone familiar with the coinage of the period as a whole cannot help noticing that the series with the legends IMP.CAESAR, CAESAR DIVI F stand out for the quality of their striking: very well centred, in even relief, easy to ‘read’; it looks as if Octavian's mint officials really cared, but was their concern rewarded? Even if one takes a less complicated view of the significance of the coin types of the period than most of the contributors to this volume, I doubt it. The general view of the level of literacy in the Roman world is that it was perhaps 5–10 per cent, spreading a bit outside the senatorial, equestrian and municipal or colonial élites, but not very far. Such people might have made sense of coin types, but probably never actually handled coins at all: that was what one had slaves for; and there is an argument from silence that has to my knowledge never been deployed, which has in my view considerable weight: in the voluminous correspondence of Cicero with Atticus, covering six volumes in Shackleton Bailey's edition, full of political comment, there is not even one reference to a coin type; nor is there one in the gossipy letters of Caelius to Cicero while the latter was in Cilicia, despite the interest of the issues of the period in question. There is a further problem: I am happy to agree that if someone received a parcel of coins, all newly struck and shiny, all of the same issue, that might have had an impact; but no such parcel is attested in the numerous hoards of the period: what anyone who did handle coins would have seen would have been jumbles of denarii covering long periods, a hundred years or more. How could anyone have picked out what was supposed to be of topical interest?

Laignoux argues at length that the types of the coinages of the various contenders were similar in approach; this does not surprise me: all sought power, so of course their coin types allude to banal themes such as victory and prosperity (20); all (probably) claimed to be defenders of liberty; nor does it surprise me that the issues of a pretender produced in different places by different legates were similar (5). The claim that ‘several literary texts … support the hypothesis of discussions about monetary questions between the pretenders and their advisers’ (5) involves a systematic abuse of the evidence: at Appian, BC 4.75.316–17 it is simply a question of an amount of coinage; at Dio 52.30.9 of denominational structure. Dio 47.25.3 is the well-known passage that mentions the reverse type of Brutus’ EID MAR issue: one short text out of reams of writing covering two generations, that in any case does not prove that anyone noticed the type; as for the ‘common-sense argument … that a subordinate could not possibly have made decisions alone on such important issues as numismatic representations’, for ‘common-sense argument’ read ‘modern prejudice’: if Arrian could decide for himself about a portrait bust of Trajan on public display, even if he reported his decision, why could subordinates not make decisions about numismatic representations? The coin allegedly minted by Lepidus in 42 b.c. (15) was in fact minted by one of the moneyers of that year. Nor did Sextus Pompeius allude explicitly to Janus (17): as Laignoux knows perfectly well, Janus was simply the immobilised obverse type of the as.

Carbone begins by discussing alleged portraits of Fulvia as Victoria on a bronze of the city of Fulvia-Eumeneia (believable, though not certain) and on a quinarius struck in Gaul and an aureus struck at Rome (the latter not by Antonius, but by a moneyer); these two heads, both also cited by Laignoux (16), do not closely resemble either each other or that on the bronze, and are in my view not portraits of Fulvia. Carbone goes on to discuss the denominational countermarks on the duoviral coinage of Corinth and the complex denominational indications on the so-called ‘fleet’ coinage of Antonius, as well as marks on issues of C. Proculeius and of Leptis Minor; these experiments and further developments from them were then supposedly ‘codified’ by Augustus; the problem is that the eastern issues in question were very small and of quite limited circulation, and that the base metal coinages of Augustus were essentially western. It also seems to me misleading to claim that Antonius developed the Caesarian practice of placing the portraits of living Roman magistrates on civic coinages, in the case of Antonius in the east; but surely the decisions were taken by local magistrates?

Devoto and Spigola discuss the coinages of the Pompeians in Africa, de Méritens de Villeneuve that of Q. Cornuficius, Wright that of Sextus Pompeius. The last curiously supposes that Picenum was a town and that it was the hometown of the gens Pompeia: as with the rest of the Roman nobility, their hometown was Rome. Asculum Picenum was besieged by Pompeius Strabo, his son inheriting a clientela in Picenum; nor is it plausible to see the type of the Catanaean brothers as representing an Italian cause, or Aeneas, the ancestor of the Roman people, as foreign; and I do not understand how south Italy being a recruiting target can be compatible with his pillaging the countryside there; all this is just irretrievably muddle-headed. Cornwell goes to town on PAXS on a tiny — and rare — quinarius of 44 b.c., as well as swallowing the absurd claim that coinage was a ‘medium of communication comparable to … mass oratory’. Suspène and Chausserie-Laprée discuss a curious hoard of aurei, found by the excavators scattered in antiquity across the floor of a room in a Roman building at Martigues in Provence; a further odd feature is that many of the coins had been hammered or bent double. The deposit had previously been disturbed by the cutting of a trench for a drain and was therefore not complete when excavated; but the Ambenay and Saumur hoards give no comfort to the suggestion that the ‘hoard’ was originally of ‘up to 200’ pieces, nor is there any reason to suppose that the ‘hoard’ was ‘originally distributed together’ in a congiarium; and (contra 153) we are exactly where we were before its discovery in understanding the iconography of the pieces that happened to compose it.

Russell argues that the prominent S.C. on the base metal coinage of Augustus and his successors functioned, if not actually aimed, to show that the Senate was a central part of the Roman Imperial state; but did men really need to be told that the Roman state was the S.P.Q.R.? Rowan states that the issues of the moneyers under Augustus combined in each issue an Imperial and a family type; has anyone believed anything different? On the coinage of one of these colleges, Woods argues that a lyre is, by way of the Greek word terpein, ‘to delight’, a pun on the name Turpilianus, as also the name Tarpeia; a crab tearing apart a butterfly, by way of dirimere, ‘to tear apart’, a pun on the name Durmius: not even Varro could have invented anything so absurd. Greet considers the eagle on coins of Augustus, reminding anyone who needs reminding that the bird recalls a legionary standard, a veteran colony, and the standards recovered from Parthia; an eagle holding a wreath in its claws is supposed, by way of the story of the eagle that removed and then replaced the cap on the head of Tarquinius Priscus, to allude to the grant of the corona ciuica to Augustus; since he went to great lengths to disguise the fact that he was a despot, this is hardly credible, except as a black joke.