'Marsham also undertook another project, a Historia Nummaria Graeca & Latina, for which a manuscript in a very early state survives. As it is less finished than the nondum edita, he may well have started it later, although there is no more precise indication of date.
There is no introduction and the first page is headed ‘Alexandri Magni Ἀποθέωσις’, after which it begins with the simple statement that ‘the coins of the ancients were either Greek or Roman; the former are earlier than the reign of Augustus, the others are later.’ Marsham continued with the rather strange, and incorrect, observation that the coins of the Macedonians are the oldest that one can be certain of, rejecting the literary evidence about coins with bows being Achaemenid, since ‘the coins struck with a kneeling archer, which can be seen today, are Parthian, and so do not refer to Achaemenid, but to Arsacid times.’ Although this is in fact wrong, it is typical of how Marsham worked: he used his great knowledge of classical texts, and would apply the texts to interpret the coins.
The discussion of Greek monarchies continued, in developed note form, for 12 pages, occasionally referring to coins in Marsham’s collection, but mostly to books such as Occo, Seguin, Tristan, and especially Spanheim and Goltzius. There is no account of Greek coins other than regal ones, and the manuscript then switches to the next section, entitled ‘Numismata Romana’. In the opening remarks, he divided Roman coins into two periods, those made from Augustus to the revolt of the moneyers under Aurelian, and from then until the reigns of Valentinian III and Thedosius II. This is a strange span, and a strange division, and Marsham went on, somewhat contradictorily, to define ‘Latin coins’ (numismata Latina) as those ‘most inappropriately’ (ineptissime) called consular (i.e. what we call Republican) and those of the emperors. He related how Occo had listed all the inscriptions of the latter, and how Orsini had ‘very finely’ (pulcherrime) published the former, by family.
He then introduced the difficult subject of chronology, the subject to which he had devoted so much of his scholarly energy. He set out his views in two sections, called ‘Chronologia Nummaria’ and ‘Geographia Nummaria’. He recorded again his view that coins were of more use to geography than chronology, even using verbatim the same phrases as in nondum edita. The chronological problems of coins are rehearsed, leading to the conclusion that ‘from this it is clear enough how uncertain is a chronology devised from coins’ (ex istis satis liquet, quam incerta sit Chronologia ex Nummis).
In the following short section, entitled ‘Geographia Nummaria’, Goltzius is much praised—‘Hubert Goltz was far more successful in studies of geography than of chronology’ (Hubertus Goltzius in Geographicis studijs longe felicior erat, quam in Chronologicis)—and he repeated his view that numismatic scholarship is much more suited to geography than chronology. He concluded by describing some of the most important ‘symbola’, which allow one to attribute coins without any inscriptions, like the owl for Athens, or the sphinx for Chios.
He then embarked on Roman coinage. A rather strange first page, entitled ‘Roma. Proconsules’ describes how coins often refer to religion, whether with gods or, in particular, temples, with many literary references. He then turned to the different emperors, essentially intending to devote a page to each one from Augustus onwards. The notes about Augustus are followed by two digressions, about the neocorate (a topic on which he spent much energy in his other papers), and the ‘Imperij constitutio’, but the pages for subsequent emperors have been mostly left blank. There is quite a full page for Vespasian, whom Marsham regarded as a ‘magnus ... Imperij propagator’ [a great extender of the empire], and then mostly blank pages followed for the second and third centuries. The last pages of this section, ‘XXX Tyranni’ and ‘Claudius, Quintillus’, are followed by the title for the second part, ‘Historiae Nummariae Romanae Pars Altera’. Its otherwise blank pages are duly headed with the names of emperors, from Aurelian to Theodosius II and Valentinian III, as promised earlier.
The scope of the work is thus clear, even though only a fraction of it had been written. What has been written is mostly in a rather disjointed form of notes, but in a style that is reminiscent of his Chronicus Canon, so the completed parts probably represent something like the intended final version.'
(Burnett 2020b, pp. 554-5)
