This monumental book, ‘envisaged as the first in a series’, deals with the changes in the weight and fineness of the Roman silver coinage in the first century ad. Although the title states that it starts with the reform of Nero, there is also a chapter on the Julio-Claudian coinage from 2 bc to ad 64 (the authors see this period as ‘effectively … the tail end of the Republican denarius coinage’), so the book will serve as a reference on the Roman silver coinage for the whole of the first century ad, although with a particular focus on the last third of the century.

The present volume has been preceded by a series of papers by the same authors on the fineness of Roman silver coinages of the first three centuries, in which they have clearly demonstrated that the data published by David Walker, in his three volumes on The Metrology of the Roman Silver Coinage (Walker 1976–Reference Walker8), cannot be relied upon. Walker published some 4,900 x-ray fluorescence (XRF) analyses taken from the lightly polished edges of the coins he examined. He also included the extensive silver issues struck in the eastern cities of Alexandria, Antioch, Caesarea and elsewhere, which have traditionally been studied separately from the denarius coinage. For some twenty years this very comprehensive data set was accepted as providing the definitive account of the fineness of Roman silver coins down to ad 253. However, already in 1989 Mike Cowell had shown that Walker’s technique did not provide an accurate picture of the metal content of the coins examined because of the phenomenon of surface enrichment whereby Roman mint-workers could ensure that coins with a significant copper-alloy content appeared to be made of pure silver (Schmitt-Korte and Cowell Reference Schmitt-Korte and Cowell1989). As a result, Walker’s data gave estimates of silver content that were both too high and with a much greater variability among individual specimens of a particular issue than was actually the case. The technique pioneered by Cowell, and employed by Butcher and Ponting, involves XRF analysis of samples drilled from the edge of the coins examined and they have demonstrated that it is only by analysing the metal content of the interior of the flans of these coins that an accurate picture of their metal content can be obtained. Importantly, they can show that there is much greater consistency in the fineness of different coins from a particular issue than did Walker’s data.

This volume therefore is very necessary in that it provides the first part of a comprehensive reworking of Walker’s data. The authors present a much more nuanced picture of the development of Roman silver coinage in the first century ad, particularly for the provincial coinages. However, the book is much more than a presentation of a series of analyses of the fineness and weights of Roman silver coinage. Butcher and Ponting present a new account of the monetary history of the Roman Empire in the first century ad in the course of which there are some important insights: for example, they note that all the significant elements in the coinage system which scholars term ‘Augustan’ had already been introduced by Julius Caesar (p 434); that the evidence that Nero’s reform occurred in ad 64 is thin and that we can only be certain that it took place between ad 63 and 66 (p 690); and they argue, following Mommsen, that this reform changed what had been a bimetallic system based on gold and silver to a monometallic system based solely on gold, with silver overvalued against it (p 690).

The book starts with some general comments on Roman silver coinage and monetary history and the question of how far the public accepted debasement of the coinage: the authors make good use of evidence from medieval Europe. There is also an interesting chapter on the history of the study of the metrology of Roman coinage: it surprised this reviewer at least to learn that this topic was first discussed by Guillaume Budé in 1514. The authors also explain how they have used the evidence of hoards to throw light on public awareness of the changes made to the weight and fineness of silver coins (the evidence of site finds being too limited to be of use).

There can be no doubt that this is a very important contribution to the study of Roman monetary history. It is to be hoped that the other volumes promised will appear soon, and encouraging that the authors have obtained an Arts and Humanities Research Council grant to continue the project into the third century ad. If there is one criticism it is that, while the heart of this book is a series of 1,136 new analyses of the metal content of Roman coins, nowhere is there a table or series of tables that sets out the full results of the analyses, with not just the silver but also the minor elements, as these are often important in revealing new sources of metal. Although these data can be downloaded from the Archaeology Data Service’s website, it seems strange that space was not found to include it in a book of over 800 pages.