Connecting Histories: Roman Conquests an

Aimed at advanced undergraduate and graduate students, this course aims to introduce coinage and the study of coins as historical disciplines and to provide a survey of the production and use of coinage in the Roman world from the third century BCE to the 1st century CE, with specific emphasis on the Late Republican coinage and the local coinages issued in the early Roman provinces. Over the course of the second and first centuries BCE, Rome conquered most of the Mediterranean world in a whirlwind of military campaigns. However, despite the unrivaled military power achieved during the second and first centuries BCE, one of the most surprising factors in the development of Roman domination of the Mediterranean world is that the Romans conquered and ruled most of it without imposing their coinage on the conquered. Therefore, it becomes even more important to research how local coinages converged—at least partly—to create compatible monetary systems across the Roman Empire. The students will have direct access to the world-class numismatic collections at the American Numismatic Collection (over 300,000 Roman and Greek pieces) and to the Olcott collection of Roman coins housed in the RBML in Butler Library (over 4,000 Roman pieces).