This volume serves as a memorial to Matthew Trundle, who passed away tragically of cancer in 2019 at the age of fifty-three, leaving behind a substantial but unfinished scholarly legacy. Most of the contributions by Trundle’s teachers, colleagues, and students were delivered at a memorial conference in 2019. The book also contains a chapter by Trundle himself, recovered from his unfinished book manuscript.
Diverse methodological possibilities are on display. Two papers (Spalinger and Matthew) pursue what might be called forensic accounting, calculating the resource requirements of military activities through careful reconstruction of pay rates and ration packages, providing a quantifiable measure of state power and its underlying costs. Unsurprisingly, several papers (Brice, De Lisle, Sheedy, and Armstrong and Termeer) engage in numismatic analysis, considering the historical contexts in which coin series were minted and circulated. Other contributions (Trundle, Rosenbloom, Millender, and Knox) take a fiscal sociology approach, treating money as a form of social power, whose ebbs and flows could constitute or disrupt other political, military, or ideological structures. Finally, we see more traditional historical and historiographical essays (Rich and Pomeroy) using literary sources to expound on complicated events where great amounts of money happened to be at stake.
Anthony Spalinger’s “The Upkeep of Empire: Costs and Rations” calculates the food required to sustain an army of roughly 5,000 soldiers during Thutmose III’s Megiddo campaign, with the arithmetic pointing towards both the considerable costs of simply feeding the army and the overall logistical sophistication of New Kingdom Egyptian warfare.
Matthew Trundle’s posthumous essay “Piety, Money and Coinage in Greek Religion” explores the impact of coinage on the economy of religion in the ancient Mediterranean. The introduction of coinage, and its ability to both lower transaction costs and allow for very small exchanges, dramatically expanded access to divine institutions. Whereas in the archaic period one might need to promise, say, an entire ox leg to a priest or priestess in order to sacrifice at a temple, by the Classical period the donation of a few coins could connect a humble worshiper spiritually and financially to a temple and its cult, aptly illustrated by Jesus’ praise of the widow offering two bronze mites at the Second Temple (Mk. 12.41-44, Lk. 21.1-4).
David Rosenbloom’s “Naval Service and Political Power in Classical Athens: An Inverse Relationship” challenges the conventional wisdom that the Athenian thetes were politically empowered by rowing in the fleet. After all, naval service took thetes away from the political institutions of Athens, even as it provided them with military pay and endowed them with military utility. Instead, diminishing citizen naval participation by the late fifth century BC and the introduction of jury pay politicized and empowered the thetes as they earned money directly participating in the democracy.
Ellen Millender’s “The Perils of Victory: Sparta’s Uneasy Relationship with the Profits of War” examines how influxes of plunder destabilized the city’s delicate constitutional balance. Wealth accrued from loot enriched militarily successful kings, amplifying their power beyond the traditional checks and balances. More problematically, generals such as Pausanias or Lysander might parlay their military success and accrued wealth into a potentially dangerous extra constitutional position.
Lee Brice’s “Pegasi and War: Patterns of Minting at Corinth in the Later Fourth Century BCE” tests whether the Corinthian Pegasi coins were struck for the purposes of trade or warfare. Minting patterns do not correspond with the city’s documented military activities, particularly Timoleon’s expedition (344–338), suggesting that the Pegasi coins were primarily deployed for the grain trade, especially during famine periods in the later fourth century.
Christopher Matthew’s “The Wage Cost of Alexander’s Pike-Phalanx” reconstructs the pay-scales of Alexander’s phalanx, arguing that common soldiers were paid four obols a day, with hypaspists and officers paid more. The exorbitant cost of the formation, however, was soon handily covered with the capture of Achaemenid bullion.
Christopher De Lisle’s “Sicily in the Mediterranean c. 540-31 BCE: Evidence from Coin Circulation” surveys the shifting patterns of both Sicilian coins found abroad and foreign coins deposited on the island, reflecting histories of interaction and imperialism across five centuries.
Kenneth Sheedy’s “RRC 1/1: The First Struck Coin for the Romans” reconsiders the thorny problem of the first Roman struck bronze coin, produced in Naples and repurposing a local design, but labeled RŌMAIŌN. He posits negligible Roman involvement, suggesting that the Neapolitan mint labeled a batch of coins “of the Romans,” perhaps to signify that they would be used to pay for supplies requisitioned by Roman armies.
Jeremy Armstrong and Marleen Termeer’s “The Military History of Early Roman Coinage” examines the origins of Roman coinage more broadly. Pushing back on arguments that coinage was introduced for social or cultural reasons, they reassert that military expenditures likely lay behind Rome’s earliest issues, with the varied and ad hoc nature of initial issues reflecting the fragmented and devolved nature of the early Republican state and its Italian confederacy.
John Rich’s “Corruption, Power and an Oracle in the Late Roman Republic: the Restoration of Ptolemy Auletes” considers the king’s bribe-drenched restoration in 55 BC. While Auletes had hoped that his fiscal largesse would lubricate a glide path back to power in 58 BC, the process soon was jammed up by the complicated institutional mechanisms and personal politics of the late Republic. The discovery of an oracle––and its publication in a contio––warning against aiding an Egyptian king ‘with a multitude’ (i.e., an army) proved a major roadblock, which a well-remunerated Pompey struggled to circumvent. Auletes was restored only through a risky work-around by Pompey and his ally Gabinius, although the latter suffered conviction and exile for repetundae for pocketing the king’s money.
Arthur Pomeroy’s “Money and Wealth in Tacitus” models the financial crisis in Rome in AD 33. Tiberius offered relief to creditors impacted by suits related to an old and until recently abeyant Caesarian law on usury, on the condition that lenders invest two thirds of their assets in Italian land. This prompted a credit crisis as creditors suddenly called in loans to purchase land, jeopardizing even many senators with insolvency. The emperor solved the “artificial crisis” by offering no-interest loans through the treasury and letting the inconvenient regulation slip back into abeyance.
Finally, Daniel Knox’s “Gothic Mercenaries” considers Gothic groups who provided troops to eastern emperors on a contingent basis. Although “mercenary” is a notoriously slippery term, these were clearly groups not under full imperial control, and their service was the result of constant negotiation with key Gothic leaders such as Theoderic the Amal, who remained autonomous figures despite grants of transient imperial office. They were mercenaries less because they served for money and more because of the weakness of the late imperial state, which was unable to maintain any sort of real jurisdiction over them.
The contributions provide a fitting memorial and also showcase Trundle’s scholarly legacy. His landmark monograph Greek Mercenaries: From the Archaic Period to Alexander considered the intersection of war, coinage, networks, and power in a sophisticated and nuanced way, and overturned longstanding conceptions of Greek mercenaries as merely money-grubbing soldiers for hire. It is regrettable that this review is not of Trundle’s unfinished monograph, Money and the Transformation of the Greek World, which surely would have been published by now had he lived. His salvaged chapter provides a glimmer of what might have been, while the entire volume illuminates the impact of his life and intellect upon scholarship related to war, money, and power in the ancient Mediterranean.