this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2025
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RoughRomanMemes

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A place to meme about the glorious ROMAN EMPIRE (and Roman Republic, and Roman Kingdom)! Byzantines tolerated! The HRE is not.

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[–] PugJesus@piefed.social 4 points 6 months ago

Explanation: The top photo is of a coin of the Principate era, the Roman Empire as we think of it. The bottom photo is of a coin in the Byzantine Empire. Artistic standards... dropped a bit.

In addition, while we think of money as very normal and natural, the fact is that a monetized economy is a very fragile thing - over the course of the collapse of the Roman Empire, the demonetization of the economy was near-total, resulting in a return to barter and, especially, clientistic economic relations rather than free exchange.