Some tokens carry specific chants connected to Roman festivals, while others carry imagery that evoke particular spectacles, processions or celebratory events. It is highly likely that some of the Roman tokens that survive were utilised within particular festivals; this chapter explores what these artefacts can reveal about the emotions and experiences of these occasions. Festival motifs may also have been placed on tokens to evoke particular emotions and memories before or after an event. Representations of objects associated with celebrations provide a rare source base for a better understanding of the paraphernalia associated with individual Roman festivities. We need to bear in mind, however, that the ‘festive’ imagery used to decorate many tokens is also found on everyday objects across the Roman world: on frescoes, mosaics, coinage, lamps and other artefacts. The imagery on these pieces is thus part of a broader cultural practice that used singular events as a basis for an iconography that evoked good fortune, abundance and a joie de vivre within daily life. The imagery of singular celebrations regularly transcended its immediate context in the Roman world to become part of the everyday lived experience. Tokens were designed within this broader cultural phenomenon.

This book is intended as a beginning, a demonstration of what the study of tokens might offer the student of antiquity after decades of neglect. There are far more tokens from Roman Italy than have been discussed here, and one imagines far more will be uncovered in the future: in excavations, museum stores and archives. Our knowledge of the potential uses of these objects is thus likely to further develop. The understanding of token use in Roman Italy will also be better contextualised as detailed studies of tokens in other regions are finalised and published.1 Once the imagery, findspots and possible uses of tokens in other regions are better known, particular aspects of tokens from Rome, Ostia or elsewhere in Italy that are unique to the region will be better identified.

Tokens remain one of the most enigmatic and under-utilised bodies of evidence from antiquity. Monetiform objects of varying materials have been known from Rome since the eighteenth century and yet our understanding of these objects has made precious little progress in the years that have followed.1 Many tokens remain unpublished, and the few individuals that have attempted the study of these objects have despaired at their elusive nature. Rostovtzeff, whose catalogue and doctoral dissertation on Roman lead tokens still remains the most detailed work on the topic to date, observed that the volume of the material, the wear on most of the pieces, as well as the seeming unending array of inscriptions and representations on these pieces are enough to warn anyone off studying them, especially when, as he noted, the study does not appear to have any scientific promise.2 Rostovtzeff’s frustration with the subject matter manifested into a hope that future studies might better elucidate the pieces he could not understand, noting that a better understanding of tokens in the East, particularly Athens, would likely result in a better understanding of these objects in Rome.

Representations of the imperial family appear on a small number of tokens from Roman Italy. Emperors, empresses and their offspring are named and/or shown on these specimens. Some of these tokens may have been issued on behalf of the emperor; others carry reference to the authority of magistrates or groups. Tokens are thus a medium that communicated both official and non-official representations of imperial power. They form an important, and to date overlooked, source for the reception and use of imperial ideology by differing groups. For those outside the imperial government, the use of imperial imagery offered an opportunity to express a particular connection with the ruling power; the imagery also contributed to status and, subsequently, social structure.1 In this way the imperial image, as well as tokens themselves as artefacts, contributed to the maintenance of social hierarchy and social relationships.

The monetiform nature of lead tokens in Italy has repeatedly led scholars to conclude that these objects operated as a form of alternative currency. Dressel believed that an assemblage from the Tiber he published represented a privately issued emergency coinage, the ‘till money’ of an innkeeper or grocer.1 Thornton identified these objects as a form of ‘peasants’ money’.2 Rostovtzeff suggested some tokens acted as surrogates for money within small household economies and groups of clients. In this discussion Rostovtzeff cited Figure 5.1, a token that names two individuals, Olympianus and Eucarpus, as well as the sum of 1,000 sestertii.

Tokens form one of the many media of everyday life through which overlapping identities were created, consolidated and performed. An individual possessed multiple identities throughout their life course; someone might have identified with a particular group or been classified into a particular category by others. A person in the Roman world might possess overlapping identities related to class, geographic region, work, gender, family, the military, cult, communal associations, or another type of community. One or more of these identities might come to the fore at different moments in a person’s life – a sense of belonging to a particular group, after all, is actively constructed and contested over time.1

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.