Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/693

Rh HISPANIA.] NUMISMATICS 635 Crete. The most important of the lesser schools is the Cretan. Crete, retaining the primitive life of older Hellas, was never truly civilized, but enjoyed to the last the privileges and exhibited the faults of an undeveloped condition. Producing in the age of high art neither sculptor nor painter of renown, the Cretans, to judge from their coins, were copyists of nature or art. At first rude, their work acquires excellence in design, but never in execution. AVhile we see their poor reproductions of the designs of the Peloponnesus, we are amazed by their skill in portraying nature. Their gods are seated in trees with a background of foliage. Their bulls are sketched as they wandered in the meadows. All fitness for the mode of relief, as well as for the material and the shape of the coin, is entirely ignored. Hence a delight in foreshortening, and a free choice of subject with no reference to the circle in which it must be figured. In spite, however, of their skill, the Cretans never attempted the three-quarter face, which is at once the best suited to the surface of a coin and the most trying to the skill of the artist. Yet their work is delightfully fresh, as if done in the open air. There is no idealism, but much life and movement. In a word, the school is naturalistic and picturesque. Its works are of the highest value in the study of Greek art, but as examples of the application of that art to coins they are to be used with caution. Nowhere else do we see the artist so freely copying nature and art, nowhere so unshackled by academic rules, nowhere so little aware of the limitation of his province. Mode of It is important to study the mode in which Greek money was coining, coined, because the forms of the pieces thus receive explanation, and true coins are discriminated from such modern falsifications as have been struck, and in some degree from those which have been cast. Our direct information on the subject is extremely scanty, but we are enabled by careful inference to obtain a very near approximation to the truth on all the most important points. The only single ancient Greek die of the authenticity of which we are persuaded was seen by Burgon in the East. He de scribed it, from recollection, as a piece of copper or bell-metal, in the shape of a truncated cone, flat at the top and bottom, about 3 inches in height, and from about 3 inches in diameter at the bottom to 2 at the top. In the upper surface was cut the die for the reverse of a tetradrachm of a Seleucid king of Syria, with the type of Apollo seated on the omphalos. There appears to have been no trace of any method of fitting this to the die of the obverse. From the appearance which the coins present, it may be inferred that the Greeks placed a ball of metal, carefully adjusted to the proper weight, and cold, between two dies, and then struck the upper die a powerful blow with a very heavy hammer. There was no collar to give the coins an exactly circular form. The dies must have been of hard metal, though softer than modern ones. Some Greek coins have been found of the same die, but such as the writer has seen did not present any evidence as to the wear to which their dies had been subjected. The Roman coins appear to have been struck in the same manner, but with a more careful adjustment of the two sides, yet without a collar. Their dies, although hard, must have been, like the Greek dies, softer than those of the moderns, since, in the case of coins from the same die, we can trace the increase of imperfections through wear, and this notwithstand ing the short period for which each die was used and the relatively few coins struck from it. In the case of Greek coins, there is similar evidence, in the great number which have bad or imperfect impressions, although not worn, since all these can scarcely owe their inferiority to insufficient force having been used in striking them. Some few Greek and Roman coins were cast and not struck ; others were first cast to give them their general form, and then struck. Both cases, however, form very rare exceptions, and are confined to particular groups of coins and not to isolated examples. Greek We may now pass on to notice the Greek coinage of each country, iage following Eckhel s arrangement. The series begins with Spain, of the far Gaul, and Britain, constituting the only great class of barbarous West. Greek coinage. It must not be supposed that the money of the whole class is of one general character ; on the contrary, it has very many divisions, distinguished by marked peculiarities ; it has, however, everywhere one common characteristic, its devices are corrupt copies of those of Greek or Roman coins. The ear liest of these barbarous coinages begin with the best imitations of the gold and silver money of Philip II. of Macedon. They probably first appeared to the north of his kingdom, but the gold soon spread as far as Gaul, and even found their way into southern Britain, by which time the original types had almost disappeared through successive degradations. Next in order of time are the silver imitations of Roman family coins, the victoriati and denarii of the commonwealth, which began in Spain and passed into Gaul and Britain, being current in those countries with the gold money of Greek origin. The copper money of Spain follows the imitated silver types ; that of Gaul and Britain, though showing Roman influence, is more original. It is useless to attempt a very minute classification of the subjects of these barbarous types, since the artists by whom they were executed did not properly understand them. Side by side with these large coinages we find Greek money of colonies in Gaul and Spain, and a far ampler issue of Phoenician coins by the Carthaginian kings and cities of the Peninsula. The coinage of Hispaiiia, corresponding to the modern Spain and Spain. Portugal, was issued during a period of about four centuries, closing in 41 A. D. There are four classes of money, which in the order of their relative antiquity are Greek, of two groups, Carthaginian, Romano -Iberian, and Latin. The first or older group of Greek money belongs to the widespread currency which reveals the mari time power of the lonians of Phoc?ea. It consists of fractions of the drachm of the Phocsean standard, from the diobol or third downwards. Its later pieces are of the Phocsan colony of Emporire, founded by the earlier settlement of Massilia. Next in order and in part contemporary, beginning before the middle of the 4th century B.C., come the drachms of Emporise, which betray the influence of Siculo- Punic art. Their standard is probably Carthaginian. Of the neighbouring Rhoda, a Rhodian colony, there is similar money. Carthaginian coins of Spain begin in the same period with the issues of the great colony of Gades, following the same weights as the Emporian drachms. These are followed by the issues of the Barcides from 234 to 210 B.C., with Carthaginian types and of Phoenician weight, struck of six denominations, from the hexadrachm to the hemidrachm. Senor Zobel de Zangroniz has classed them to Spain, on the grounds of provenance and the possession of the silver mines by the Barcide kings, against Miiller, who attri butes them to Africa. The types are Carthaginian, and present some interesting subjects. The true Iberian currency begins not long after the Punic. The later drachms of Emporise, ultimately following the weight of the contemporary Roman denarius, have Iberian legends, and form the centre of a group of imitations issued by neighbouring native tribes with their distinctive in scriptions. This coinage ceased when the Roman province was formed in 206 B.C. A little before this date the Romans had begun to introduce Latin money ; about this time, however, they took the backward step of permitting native coinages of Latin weight. Probably they found that native legends and types were more welcome to their subjects than those of Rome. Consequently this coinage of Spain under the republic, which lasted until 133 B.C., may be almost considered national. The two provinces Hispania Citerior and Hispania Ulterior have this marked difference : the coins of the nearer province, of silver and bronze, have always Iberian inscriptions on the reverse, and are clearly under distinct Roman regulation ; those of the farther are apparently of independent origin, and consequently bear Iberian, Phoenician, Libyo-Phcenician, and Latin legends, but they are of bronze alone. The interest of these coins lies mainly in their historical and geographical information. They bear the names of tribes, often the same as those of the town of mintage. The art is poor, and lacks the quaint originality and decorative quality of that of Gaul. Ultimately the native money was wholly Latinized (133 B.C.), though political circumstances for a time renewed it under Sertorius (80-72 B.C.) in the modified form of a bilingual currency. The purely Latin issues of the two provinces, and under the empire more largely (from 27 B.C. ) of the three, Tarra- conensis, Bsetica, and Lusitania, present little of interest. They closed in the reign of Caligula (37-41 A.D.), though in later times purely Roman money in gold and silver was issued at different times in Hispania down to the establishment of the Visigothic kingdom. The imperial money of Hispania introduces us to one of the two great classes of provincial coins under the empire ; the larger of these was the Greek imperial, bearing Greek inscriptions, the smaller the Roman colonial, with Latin inscriptions, deriving its name from the circumstance that among Greek-speaking nations the colonise were distinguished by the use of the Latin language on their money. In the coinage of Hispania, issued by a nation adopting Latin for official use, the aspect of the coinage is colonial, though it was not wholly issued by colonies. Many of the Spanish towns belong to the kin dred class of municipia ; others are neither colonise nor municipia. In Hispania the obverse of the coin bears, as usual in the colonial class, the head of the emperor or of some imperial personage, the reverse a subject proper to the town. The priest guiding a plough drawn by a yoke of oxen is peculiarly proper to a colonia, as portray ing the ceremony of describing the walls of the city, so also an ox, with the same reference, the altar of the imperial founder, or, as connected with his cultus, a temple, probably in some cases that of Roma and Augustus. Other types, however, portray the old temples in restored Roman shapes, or indicate directly by fishes, ears of corn, and more rarely bunches of grapes, the products of the country, not, as in Greek cities, those products in relation to religion. Some original and grotesque types have a markedly local character. The money of Augusta Emerita (Merida) in Lusitania, a colony of pensioners (emeriti), is specially interesting, including as it does the silver issues of P. Carisius, the legatus of Augustus. The coinage commonly called that of Gaul belongs to the people The more properly than to the country ; for it comprehends pieces issued Gauls, by the Gauls or other barbarians from the borders of Macedonia and Illyricum to the English Channel and the Bay of Biscay, through Pannonia, part of Germany, Helvetia, and Gaul. It in-