“In a way the coin is our superior. The hardness of its metal secures for it ‘eternal’ existence. A coin does not grow, it issues ready-made from the mint and should remain as it then is; it should never change.”
–Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power
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The night was moonless, clear, perfect for the attack. From the summit of the citadel, the Roman defenders would never see them coming through the darkness, yet the silver glow of the starlight was just enough to illuminate a route for the Gauls up the rugged cliffs.
This siege had gone on long enough. Several months had passed since the Gallic tribe, led by their chieftain Brennus, had won an astonishing victory over the Romans a few miles from the city. So bewildered were the Gauls at their sudden success, they hesitated in marching upon Rome itself, suspecting an elaborate trap. The delay allowed many of the citizens to escape, and a steadfast contingent of warriors to fortify a position on the Capitoline Hill, Rome’s most sacred summit and home of her gods. From their high stronghold, the remaining men watched helplessly as the barbarians rampaged through the familiar streets below, putting to the torch the Romans’ revered temples and their beloved homes.
A thousand terrors forced them to turn their eyes to the sea of calamities all around—the screams of those left behind, the roaring of flames, the crashing of falling masonry—as if “fate had made them spectators to the nightmare of their country’s ruin.”
Understanding the basics of how ancient coins were created helps to remind us that these cold disks of metal have a human story to tell.It seemed that before young Rome even had a chance to realize her potential, she had fallen.
The city was left a smoldering wreck, her last soldiers surrounded and massively outnumbered. Still, they were certain they would prevail. Romans, after all, embraced fearful odds. Not to mention that the Gauls lacked the discipline needed for protracted siege warfare. Rationing of supplies, guard details, watchwords: these things meant nothing to bearded barbarians. The attackers had also burned the city’s grain supplies during their sacking and were now encamped in charred, malarial valleys strewn with the rotting dead. The Romans—hardened by disaster and defending ancestral soil—were confident that disease and hunger would break the invaders before long. They would soon be proved right. The attack, though, when it came, took them by surprise.
The Gauls had eventually identified the most vulnerable ascent to the citadel, if only by following the footprints of a Roman messenger who had passed freely though their lines. Tonight, navigating by starlight alone, they would scale the cliffs by the same route and put an end to this upstart republic. It would prove a difficult scramble, especially when attempted in darkness and under arms. But with uncharacteristic self-control the Gauls ascended in silence, passing weapons between one another without a sound, and acting as footholds for their comrades as they hoisted themselves up the jagged rock face. The Roman sentries on duty heard nothing of the coming attack. Their guard dogs too, tuned to the slightest noise in the darkness, did not stir. As destiny would have it, a more unlikely animal was to play the role of Rome’s savior that night.
Cresting the summit of the hill, the Gauls emerged before a flock of geese left to wander the citadel. These were the sacred animals of Juno, chief goddess of the Roman state and protectress of the city. Despite the near starvation of the besieged soldiers, the birds had not been killed for food and were, indeed, kept well fed. That devotion was soon to be rewarded. Disturbed by the barbarians, the geese clapped their wings frantically and shook the night air with their honks, like trumpets rousing every soldier from his slumber. First to the scene was the highly decorated and perfectly named officer Marcus Manlius, who charged the leading barbarian and with a crushing blow from the boss of his shield sent him headlong back over the cliff. With more Romans arriving, other Gauls soon followed him into the void, tumbling down onto their fellows below. The defenders rained down javelins on the remaining barbarians clinging desperately to the rock face. As Juno’s geese gabbled their approval, every one of the attackers was soon sent hurtling into the blackness.
Spurred by their successful defense, the Romans offered the weary barbarians a decisive battle and the chance to end the entire ordeal once and for all. Their victory was swift, bloody, and complete—the Gauls were annihilated. With her sacred geese, Juno had saved Rome from imminent destruction. The wife of Jupiter and queen of the gods had once again affirmed herself protectress of the city. Rebuilding commenced immediately. Rome, as she would do so often throughout her history, would return from disaster with more strength and resolve than ever before.
The Gallic sack of Rome in 390 BC would ever after haunt the Roman imagination. Having only thrown out its kings a little over a century before, the fledgling Republic had been brought to the brink and survived. Virtues that defined the Roman character—discipline, courage, endurance, piety—had been put to the test in the crucible of war and delivered a resounding victory over the enemy. For the next eight hundred years, no barbarian would breach the walls of the city.
A glorious new temple now rose on the site of the foiled Gallic attack. It would honor Juno in her role as the goddess who warns Rome of imminent dangers. The Temple of Juno Moneta, “the Warner” (from the Latin verb monere, meaning “to warn”), would thereafter watch over the ever-growing city from its prominent outcrop on the Capitoline. Yet as well as guarding the Roman populace, Juno Moneta would also safeguard the wealth of the state. It was perhaps for this reason that the temple soon took on a second function: it became the mint of the Roman Republic. Here Rome would strike her name not only into the coins that fueled her economy but also into history itself. From the mint, a gleaming and seemingly endless river of lovingly crafted coins flowed by the million, ready to spread the dream of Rome far and wide. Coinage struck in this very building would travel to every corner of the world under Roman dominion and beyond—later to be unearthed as far afield as Iceland, India, and China.
For centuries those gathering in the Forum square—the epicenter of the Roman world—could, with a single glance, look from the coins in their palms up to the temple in which they were created. So connected were the two in the Roman mind that those precious disks of gold, silver, and bronze were simply called moneta, after the watchful goddess. In this way, the Temple of Juno Moneta continues to loom large over all our lives today. It is, of course, from her name that we derive the English word for that force that still makes our world go round: money.
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Every single ancient coin was made by hand. When you hold one in your fingertips and marvel at its intricate design, it is vital to remember that each stage of its creation was completed by skilled craftsmen without any modern tools or machinery. Awed by the engineering perfection of a Roman aqueduct or the mind-boggling complexity of a Greek astronomical “supercomputer,” we may be forgiven for assuming the ancients must have devised a clever mechanized solution for something as simple as hammering coins. In fact, the process was a manual one from beginning to end, remaining essentially unchanged until the sixteenth century’s first experiments with machine-pressed “milled” coinage.
Understanding the basics of how ancient coins were created helps to remind us that these cold disks of metal have a human story to tell—each one the product of human sweat, toil, and ingenuity. Essentially, ancient coins were made by placing a blank disc of metal called a flan between two engraved dies and striking them with a hammer. The lower die, set tightly into an anvil, would imprint the obverse or “heads” side of the coin, while the handheld upper die would imprint the reverse or “tails” design. But this swing of the hammer was just the final step in an intricate process, demanding the skills of a diverse team of workers. Minting ancient coins was, in every respect, a collaborative endeavor.
The story of each coin can be traced as far back as the extraction of its metals from the earth. Of the many cruel fates that might await the enslaved across the ancient world, condemnation to the mines—damnatio ad metalla—was the most feared of all. Slaves in their thousands—an estimated sixty thousand working at one Roman mine in Spain alone—were forced to hack endlessly at the rock in the near-total darkness of cramped, suffocating tunnels. So horrific were conditions for those laboring in the mines, being sent to one was generally considered a prolonged death sentence. When not being mined directly, the precious metals required for coinage were plundered from conquered lands. The emperor Trajan is thought to have brought home from his conquest of Dacia (modern Romania) around 225 tons of gold and 450 tons of silver to fill the state treasury—enough to strike 31 million gold aurei and 160 million silver denarii coins.
While their voices have been sadly lost to time, they continue to speak to us through the countless artworks they left as a lasting legacy to the world.Questions of how much coinage to inject into the Roman economy were closely tied to state expenditure at the time, though little is known of the bureaucracy behind such decisions. What is clear is that coinage has always helped, as one scholar put it, to “facilitate exchange between people, the payment of taxes and external trade”; naturally, as the scale and population of Rome’s dominion expanded, so would the demand for new coin from the mint.
Once a finance magistrate, consul, or emperor decided on the amount of coin needed, the allotted weight of precious metals was designated by officers in the Roman treasury situated in the Temple of Saturn at the base of the Capitoline. The bullion was then taken on a short journey to the summit and delivered to the mint, presumably under the tightest security. Going by the procedures at medieval mints, from which more evidence survives, we can assume that the metal passed through a network of officials and assayers who carefully tested its purity. Batches of blank circular flans of gold, silver, or bronze were then preprepared by metal workers to exacting weight standards.
No coin was complete until it was embossed with a carefully chosen design—the state’s stamp of approval. Of all the skills involved in ancient coin production, perhaps none impresses more than the artistry of the die engraver. The detail and creativity of the designs stamped into the metal of ancient coins, often just millimeters across, continued to fascinate long after the ruin of the classical world. As the wonders of Rome faded from memory, the art of her coinage remained prevalent, inspiring many a great Renaissance mind. The dies that punched both sides of a coin were cut entirely by hand. It is worth emphasizing what this entailed: a craftsman engraving tiny images and lettering directly into the hard bell-bronze stamps, using only simple chiseling tools—and for good measure, cut in reverse so designs were read the correct way when imprinted. As no Roman die engravers ever signed their creations, they remain to us anonymous masters.
All of this was completed without any eyeglasses or magnification. This feat seems even more miraculous today: many delightful details on coins from my own collection can only be revealed under the microscopic scrutiny of high-definition photography. While primitive lenses are known from the ancient world—and one anecdote reveals that the emperor Nero may have used a lens of sorts to better see the action at gladiator fights—these were rare curios. It seems fair to assume that expert mint engravers would have suffered from significant shortsightedness by the end of their careers. Furthermore, the intense stresses placed on these hand-cut dies during the minting process meant they only survived a few thousand blows of the hammer—perhaps a single day’s use—before they cracked or wore down to an unacceptable degree. By that point, engravers needed to be ready with another set of dies without delay. Studies have shown that a single issue of Roman coinage would routinely require hundreds of engraved dies for each side of a coin.
When it was time for the strike, the metal blanks were heated to soften them in readiness for the hammer blow. Visual or written descriptions of mint teams in action are all but nonexistent in ancient sources, perhaps owing to the secrecy and security around the process; forgery was enough of a problem already, without giving counterfeiters an instruction manual too. But from the scant surviving evidence, we can surmise that a team of at least three men brought the minting process to its climax. A rare bronze token shows one man placing the flan on the anvil, another positioning the upper die over it, and another wielding the hammer, ready to strike. Given the enormous output of the mint, it is likely that multiple teams like this were at work simultaneously, from dawn till dusk and possibly beyond; a later medieval chronicler states that the “hammers of the moneyers are never still, day and night.”
Before they bring the hammer down, we may ask, who were the craftsmen making these coins? Thousands must have worked in the mint during the many centuries it operated, yet not a single testimony from one of them has come down to us. Does that mean, then, that they were downtrodden slaves, not so far removed from those toiling in the mines? A fortuitously surviving inscription celebrates a selection of workers at the mint in the year AD 115. It lists sixty-three names and whether they are liberti or servi—freedmen or slaves. Just over half are labeled as free men.
In the great social dynamism of the era, many of the slaves would have hoped to earn their freedom through the quality of their work at the mint. Conditions were no doubt dangerous and unpleasant, but this was not a torturous workhouse. Skilled men worked together in small teams, with little distinction between the free and enslaved, to manufacture a precision-made product. While their voices have been sadly lost to time, they continue to speak to us through the countless artworks they left as a lasting legacy to the world.
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Reprinted from A History of Ancient Rome in Twelve Coins by Gareth Harney. Copyright © 2025. Printed with permission from Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.
