From: gknysh
Message: 67644
Date: 2011-05-29
> I find the 'speculations' of Crawford and Lockyear pretty solid.****GK: Have I missed something? (entirely possible). I read through the Lockyear thesis you kindly provided to us for consultation in pdf form. As I remember it, he contradicts Crawford on a number of crucial points. He (Lockyear) does not believe that there was some substantial increase in slave trade on the Danube in the years associated with unusually high influx of Roman denarii into Dacia, and he castigates Crawford for not noticing how many of these denarii (and esp.later since hoarding was a continuous process) were "local imitations" (which means they would hardly have been used by Romans to buy things from the Dacians). So why the influx in those years [73-65]? Lockyear argues that Roman denarii became suddenly desirable to Dacian elites as "status symbols" of respected Roman power esp. in the aftermath of the crushing defeat Lucullus had inflicted on Mithradates, and were used "internally" in Dacia not as a medium of exchange but as "prestige objects" for various internal Dacian non-economic reasons. Slave trade must have continued on the Danube at the usual pace, as before and after and so on. And the coins thus bought the usual things from the Dacians which otherwise they would have wanted other commodities in exchange for. Do you have any passages I missed where Lockyear supports Crawford's "slave acquisition boom" interpretation? *****