Antoninianus falls to 2% silver
By the height of the Crisis of the Third Century, around 270 AD under Aurelian, the antoninianus contained roughly 2 to 5 percent silver. It was a bronze coin with a thin silver wash that would rub off within months of circulation. The Roman price index, which we can partially reconstruct from Egyptian wheat prices recorded on papyri, shows prices rising roughly 50-fold over the third century. The mechanism was no longer subtle: everyone knew the coins were worthless. The political economy of debasement had collapsed into pure hyperinflation.
The silver wash on late antoniniani sometimes lasted only weeks before the bronze core showed through. Modern hoards dug up across the former empire are almost entirely composed of these late-crisis coins — they were hoarded precisely because nobody trusted them as a store of value.
01 · Coin Clipping
The earliest documented currency debasements happened in the Roman Empire, when emperors under fiscal strain began secretly reducing the precious-metal content of coins while leaving their face value unchanged. The mechanism was crude: mint the same denarius or antoninianus, but with less silver. Over roughly 240 years, the Roman silver coin went from about 97 percent silver under Augustus to under 2 percent silver during the Crisis of the Third Century. Each emperor who debased the coinage inherited a slightly lighter silver content and left it slightly lighter still.
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