Corrigenda

Extract

1. Professor Alföldi and the Roman Contorniates. In a letter to the Editor of this Journal Professor Alföldi has pointed out that I misrepresented his remarks apropos of the New Year and Roman medallions on p. 40 of his Die Kontorniaten, when I stated (JRS 1945, 118) that he declares that all the bronze medallions were New Year gifts. This, I now see, certainly was an inaccurate statement, for which I owe Professor Alföldi an apology. For actually he allows that the medallionissues, once begun, could be extended to other imperial festivals (‘einmal angefangen konnte die Prägung solcher Medaillen auch auf andere Kaiserfeste ausgedehnt werden’). But he does say that we may seek the starting-point of the whole bronze medallion-series in ‘show’ New Year issues, which were thought of as artistic presents for persons of rank (‘wir möchten aber noch viel weiter gehen und den Ausgangspunkt der ganzen Medaillonprägung in Bronze in solchen prunkhaften Neujahrsprägungen suchen, die als kunstvolle Geschenke für vornehme Herren gedacht waren’). That a large proportion of the medallions, taken as a whole, were undoubtedly struck as New Year gifts I fully agree. I am not, however, convinced that we have evidence that the custom of giving New Year presents set going the whole idea of issuing medallions. Apart from Hadrian's silver Felicitas type, which may possibly refer to New Year luck, our earliest gold and silver pieces, of Augustus (Diana, Principes Iuventutis (if genuine)), Domitian (Minerva, Germania), Trajan (Adventus, Providentia Senatus), and Hadrian (Juppiter), contain no obvious New Year allusions; and of the earliest bronze types, those struck under Trajan and Hadrian, only a small proportion—four (New Year formula in wreath, Hadrian in zodiac frame with Seasons, Four Seasons, Tellus with Seasons) out of the seventy-four types known to me—seem to allude specifically to the calendar New Year, and the first two of these may allude to the regnal New Year. Some of the other types of these two Emperors may have been issued at the New Year, but we have no proof of it. There were other public and ceremonial occasions equally suitable for making presents of this kind. New Year allusions on medallions gather volume under Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, and Commodus; but not all of these can be connected with the calendar New Year, and types with a wide variety of other associations still abound. It was not only at the New Year that gifts of coins were made (Suet., Aug. 75); and there would seem to be no reason why a whole range of occasions and contexts, of which the New Year was but one, should not have been envisaged for medallion-issues from the start.