This chapter analyses the structures of society through the changing faces of estate management, agricultural production, and long-distance trade. It reframes Merovingian society as one radically altered by new landholding patterns, resource utilisation, and tastes in consumption, rather than one trapped passively in post-Roman economic decline. The period still had its challenges, including poverty, pandemic, and environmental change. Our interpretation of the fragmentary and inconsistent evidence very much depends on the areas we choose to prioritise.

Between the late second and the early fourth century CE, several empresses received the title Mater Castrorum, either in official documents, inscriptions, and coinage or in unofficial honorific or dedicatory inscriptions erected by subjects. Scholars have assumed the title was indicative of a tight-knit relationship between the empresses and the soldiers. Recent studies of the numismatic and epigraphic evidence, however, have demonstrated that, at least in the cases of the early Matres Castrorum, the title was not descriptive of an actual relationship with the military. These studies argue it was the product of dynastic propaganda that prepared a smooth path for successors. Given this new, demonstrated understanding of the title’s original purpose this chapter investigates how the title fits into ideologies that emperors “negotiated” with the constituencies in the Empire. Based on the evidence, we conclude that the meaning and use of the Mater Castrorum title changed over time according to the agenda of those who employed it. The evolution of the title is not surprising, but as with so many aspects of investigations into women and the military, the complexities of its use have not previously been conceived of in this way.

In its capacity as the principal city on the east coast of the Mediterranean, Antioch was an important center of both minting and coin circulation during the fourth through seventh centuries. Moreover, as the launching site for military expeditions against the Persians and, eventually, the Arabs, Antioch served as the temporary capital for emperors and other military leaders stationed there and as a distribution point for soldiers’ salaries and other monetary activities.

Shortly after the declaration of independence, the Liberian government established the Liberian dollar as its national currency. According to President Joseph J. Roberts, it was intended to both promote commerce and demonstrate the sovereignty of the Liberian state. The first coins were minted in England, with the financial backing of a British banker and abolitionist, as the Liberian state did not then have the means to fund their minting itself. These token coins were later supplemented with paper money printed in Monrovia. The Liberian dollar was an unbacked paper currency. It was initially valued at par with the US dollar but quickly depreciated as the Liberian government turned to the printing press during repeated fiscal crises in the decades after 1847. This chapter chronicles the Liberian government’s efforts to sustain the value of its currency, the adoption by the turn of the century of British sterling as the primary medium of exchange, followed by the replacement of British currency by the US dollar in 1943. The case of Liberia illustrates that formal monetary sovereignty may have little significance for governments lacking the resources and capacity to sustain the value of their currency, which may force them to adopt others to sustain their trade and public finances.

This chapter presents a selection of images of the emperor in the presence of members of his court, as depicted in reliefs, statue groups, coins, medallions, and frescos. It also includes a number of texts that discuss now-lost depictions of the emperor and his court. It is suggested that such images were important to constituting and reinforcing public perceptions of who was part of the imperial court, and of the hierarchy of the court at a particular moment. The destruction or defacement of images of courtiers who had fallen from grace – known today as damnatio memoriae – illustrated to contemporaries (and illustrates to us) specific changes in court hierarchy, and the general instability of that hierarchy. A number of the sources in the chapter come from provincial contexts, which also illustrates that the image of the imperial court had an impact on the peripheries of the Roman empire.

Chapter One: Counting Change presents the theoretical models and methodologies used in preparing coin finds for this kind of examination. This chapter should be read in conjunction with Appendix 1, which provides a more technical description and examples of how the dataset was collected and examined digitally.

Chapter Five: Imperial Creations (192–284 CE) investigates the outcome of these negotiations between the citizens and their imperial overlords, as the balance of Roman involvement in Antioch shifted from provincial to imperial in an increasingly unstable climate. Antioch was not yet a completely imperially governed city, as the civic administration retained a visible degree of agency and still presented itself as a distinct body. Even so, the Antiochians were forced to adjust under intensified Roman rule as the imperial government exploited the city’s resources and interrupted civic operations.

Chapter Three: Imperial Transitions (129 BCE–31 BCE) clarifies that it was the civic body that outlasted the fall of the Seleucid Empire and weathered Roman annexation. For much of this transitional period, the dysfunction of the final Seleucid kings and the subsequent hands-off attitude of the Roman generals and governors present within the city and Levant allowed or forced the Antiochians into managing their own internal affairs. In the early years of Roman rule in particular, it is difficult to claim that Antioch served as a provincial capital, because so much of the city was defined by the far more restricted authority of the citizens themselves.

As examined in Chapter Four: Provincial Negotiations (31 BCE-192 CE), the rise of the principate ushered in a series of significant restructurings of the Middle East, which elevated the place of Antioch into a new provincial role and forged new ties to the city. Although these Roman activities are often portrayed as eclipsing the municipal structures, operations, and identities of the Antiochians, far more complex exchanges both divided and drew together the established civic population and the Roman administration.

Chapter Two: Imperial Beginnings (300–129 BCE) traces Antioch’s gradual promotion to Seleucid capital and the degree to which this role and the policies of the kings shaped life within the city and its status and connections in the wider region. The civic population developed alongside in both its agency and identity, but only emerged from the shadow of the Seleucids intermittently.

With the inception of the late antique period, Antioch finally transformed fully into the role of imperial Roman city and capital. As explored in Chapter Six: Imperial City (284–450 CE), even this status did not end the expression or boldness of the Antiochians, but the civic structure as a whole continued to evolve under the now formalized imperial presence and the Christianization of the empire. Antioch and its people were integrated into the Roman imperial system to a greater degree than ever before.

Early attempts by Parthian rulers to take Babylon were short-lived, but in 141 BC they established their kingship by celebrating the New Year festival. Chronicles and astronomical diaries continued to be written. An independent ruler of Maysan in the Sealand, Hyspaosines, captured the port on the Tigris, took control of Bahrain and Failaka to control Gulf trade, and briefly claimed kingship of Babylon. He wrote in Aramaic. The Parthians regained control and rebuilt the Greek theatre. The old buildings and city plan continued to be in use, although the Summer Palace had been reroofed with terracotta tiles. New kinds of text were written on clay in cuneiform, astronomical science developed; an archive shows that temples were still active, and much older literature was still prized. Greek knowledge of the Epic of Creation was still alive in Athens from the time of Alexander until the sixth century AD. The cult of Bēl had spread west to Palmyra, to the Aegean island of Kos, and north to Edessa. In AD 116 Trajan visited the Summer Palace on a pilgrimage to the place where Alexander had died.

This piece explores what the representation of the emperor on lead tokens can reveal about the dynamics of imperial ideology formation. In particular, I explore what effect mass (re)production had on the imperial image in the Roman world. Although representations of the emperor on large media and in important locations were often tightly controlled, on small media that were mass-produced, the image of the emperor escaped the control of the imperial authorities. Paradoxically, this meant that the imperial image increased in power, gathering innumerable associations and meanings as a ‘shared’ image. Allowing the inhabitants of the Roman Empire to be co-creators of imperial ideology meant that ultimately a more personalised, and thus more powerful, connection to the emperor was generated.

Ovid’s Epistulae ex Ponto 2.8 commemorates the exiled poet’s receipt of a gift of silver images of the Caesars from Rome. This paper argues, with reference to Augustan coinage and Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, that the poem deconstructs Romans’ self-subjugation to imperial iconography and highlights their role in vesting it with power. Through comic deployment of the pathetic fallacy via a naïve narrative persona, Ovid shows how, from a provincial perspective, the emperor's numen might really appear to reside in his image, placing the emperor literally in his subjects’ hands. Pont. 2.8 therefore comments more generally on the interpretive possibilities, social practices, and psychology surrounding Roman imperial images, locating their power in plural, subjective, democratic acts of creative consumption.

The peasant economy depended on some purchases of essentials like querns and whetstones yet the numismatic record does not support the idea of a widely available currency of a low denomination low enough to have been used in every transaction. Cash circulated through waged work and small-scale marketing but Anglo-Saxon coins were of too high a denomination to have been used for petty sales and purchases. Thinking only in terms of an officially sanctioned currency may be a barrier to understanding early medieval attitudes to money. Real life practice may have been more flexible. All that trading partners need is a trusted medium of exchange and in the countryside marketing may have been much less regulated than the laws prescribe. Other units of value, reckoned in monetary terms, could do the work that coinage did.