Ancient Coins of the Graeco-Roman World

CREEK COINAGE AND WAR
Everyone living today must know that both actual war and
preparation against the eventuality of it are very expensive items
indeed in a nation's budget. Yet, because of the economic structure
of the modern world, the impact of military expenditure on coinage as
such is not immediately apparent; strategic materials imported from
abroad are not, in fact, paid for by exporting sackfuls of paper
money or current coin. The reason for this is obvious enough: the
paper money and the coins have no intrinsic value, for as paper or
metal they are nearly worthless, and they function only as tokens
representing a nation's stock of real wealth consisting of bullion or
natural resources or manufactured goods or services.
In the ancient world things were much simpler, and the relation-
ship of coinage to wealth much more immediate. Of course, coinage
was not the only form of wealth: agricultural produce, metals, manu-
factured goods were important then, as they are today. But coinage
was then normally struck in precious metal, so that the actual coins
represented wealth and were not merely tokens standing for it. In
such circumstances, coins need not be localized in circulation; gold
and silver coins could be, and were, exported in sackfuls to pay
directly for imports, as we see in the example of the numerous hoards
of Athenian tetradrachms discovered in various parts of the Near and
Middle East. The full pattern of this movement of coinage is not
recoverable because, in areas in which a local coinage was the legal
tender, the imported coinage was normally melted down on arrival to
supply bullion for the local coinage. Occasionally, however, the
urgency to convert imported foreign coins into local currency appears
to have been so great that the quicker, but less efficient, process of
overstriking was employed rather than the slower process of melting
down, casting new flans, and restriking. Thus, in late fourth-
century Crete, we can detect a flood of foreign coinage, particularly
from Cyrenaica, which had entered the island in the pockets of
returning mercenaries and been restruck with local types.