Money and War Conference Opening Keynote: Minting Coins to Pay the Troops? Pros and Cons: An Attempt at a General Overview for the Greco-Roman World

Minting coins for trade, for war, or for cultic purposes: each of these possibilities (recalling Dumézil’s tripartite division of society) has its advocates. Although perhaps not the most impartial commentator on the subject—having long argued for the close connection between coinage and military needs—this paper proposes to offer a general overview. On the one hand, it reviews the arguments supporting the view that, in terms of monetary volume, military expenditures were the primary driver of coin production. On the other hand, it presents the set of counterarguments that call for at least a nuanced assessment of this conclusion.

About the speaker:

François de Callataÿ is an archaeologist and art historian specializing in ancient Greek coinage and the broader reception of antiquity. A significant part of his work focuses on the quantification of ancient coinage. He is the creator of the websites SILVER (https://silver.knowledge.wiki/SILVER, which includes nearly 3,000 studies of coin dies and as much Greek overstrikes) and FINA (https://fina.knowledge.wiki/FINA_Wiki, for Fontes Inediti Numismaticae Antiquae, which gathers unpublished sources related to numismatic antiquarianism). He is the author of more than 600 contributions, amounting to over 9,000 published pages in 24 countries. Long head of departments at the Royal Library of Belgium, (including the national collection of coins and medals), he is also a professor at the Université libre de Bruxelles and was for nearly a quarter-century director of studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris). A member of several academies, he is the current president of the Royal Academy of Belgium. Laureate of the Francqui Prize in 2007 (considered the highest scientific distinction in Belgium) and an honorary doctor of Sofia University (Sint Kliment Ohridski), he is also the recipient of the three main medals in the numismatic world (awarded by the American, British, and French societies).