Ancient & modern
AS the happy people of Europe link hands, singing and dancing, to welcome the bright new dawn of the euro, they might consider the judgment of Tacitus on the British acceptance of Roman ways in the 1st century AD: 'the ignorant called it civilisation: it was in fact a mark of their servitude'.
In the ancient world, only Athens in the 5th century BC and Egypt during the period of the Greek kings (Ptolemies', c. 300-31 BC) attempted anything like the imposition of their own coin, to the exclusion of any other, on their subjects. In Athens' case, it is quite unclear to what extent their efforts were successful; they were certainly short-lived. The Ptolemies were more successful, though even they allowed local issues to mingle with the royal coinage on the edges of their dominions.
The Romans were well aware that there might be something in a uniform currency. As Augustus Caesar's adviser Maecenas is made to say, 'None of the cities [of our empire] should be allowed to have its own separate coinage or system of weights and measures; they should all be required to use ours.' In fact, it was only near the very end of the empire (under Diocletian, who abdicated in AD 305) that the Romans saw fit to impose a common currency on everyone.
In the Western empire, Roman coin came to be the standard simply because hundreds of city coinages petered out in favour of it (no local Western coinage was struck after AD 54). The probable explanation is that the conquered peoples had not been city dwellers but now, surrounded by Roman architecture and civic forms, they had come to see themselves as Roman. In the Eastern empire, however, Romans had taken over a powerfulpolis (city-state') tradition, in which Greek consciousness of their identity and rich past was deep-rooted, and local coinage continued to be struck by the polls authorities out of a sense of pride and self-respect.
At least those nations of Europe that have chosen to adopt the euro have done so freely, albeit with a great deal of central bullying (vote and vote and vote again, you ignorant brutes, till you get it right). So we cannot say quite yet that Brussels is an empire, 'a political system based on the actual or threatened use of force to extract surpluses from subjects'. Nevertheless, the issuing of a common currency, with all that implies in terms of ideology, autonomy, political identity and assertion of power, could be a useful first step in the servitude stakes, if nothing else.
Peter Jones
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