Roman Empire Inflation >The real crisis came after [Emperor] Caracalla, between 258 [A.D.] and 275, in a period of intense civil war and foreign invasions. The emperors simply abandoned, for all practical purposes, a silver coinage. By 268 there was only 0.5 percent silver in the denarius.
Prices in this period rose in most parts of the empire by nearly 1,000 percent.
>Now, one of the things that had happened in the course of this 3rd-century inflation was that the government found that when it paid its troops in token coinage, or even in debased silver coins, prices immediately rose. Every time the silver value of the denarius dropped, prices naturally rose.
>The result was that the government, in order to try to protect its civil servants and its soldiers from the effects of inflation, began to demand payment of taxes in kind and in services rather than in coin. They wound up, in effect, repudiating their own issued coins, not accepting them for tax collection purposes.
Angel Russell
A E S T H E T I C J A P A N E S E S I L V E R F O R U M
>In Diocletian's time, in the year 301, he fixed the price at 50,000 denarii for one pound of gold. Ten years later it had risen to 120,000. In 324, 23 years after it was 50,000, it was now 300,000. In 337, the year of Constantine's death, a pound of gold brought 20,000,000 denarii.
Gavin Gonzalez
got a source for this? does that even make sense? Could the roman government even imagine that kind of number?
Sebastian Edwards
It makes sense when you learn they inflated their currency by lowering the silver content of their coins.
>By the time of Trajan in 117 AD, the denarius was only about 85 percent silver, down from Augustus's 95 percent. By the age of Marcus Aurelius, in 180, it was down to about 75 percent silver. In Septimius's time it had dropped to 60 percent, and Caracalla evened it off at 50/50..... By 268 there was only 0.5 percent silver in the denarius.
