S5004001

The Celts outside Ga ul

they incłude denarii of 60 and 45 bc: and the reign of Augustus, and the senes probably ended late in the first century bc, around the time of Tiberius' campaign in Pannonia (12-9 bc).

In Bohemia we encounter the central European gold coinage zonę. and herc the principal tribal grouping responsible for coinage was the Boi i, kinsmen of the Cisalpine Boii who issued no identifiable coinage, but may well have been received as fugitives by their transaipine peers when they fled from the Roman advance into northern Italy in 191 bc. A second important coin-producing group were the lords of the sprawling warrior set tlenieni at Nlanching. In this environment gold was the fundamental coinage metal, beginning with close imitations of posthumous staters of Alexander III (69). These were struck in western Moravia and nearby areas of Bohemia around the end of the fourth and early in the third centuries bc, contemporary with the earliest Danubian tetradrachms to the east and the earliest Philip staters to the west. The Alexander prototype with helmeted head of Athena and a standing figurę of Nike helped to engender the characteristically horseless designs of the later gold coinages of northern central Europę.

The Alexander tradition then developed in several directions. ‘Allds’ £ staters were adopted in Bohemia (70), perhaps by the Boii themselves, and the early reverse types of this coinage were derived from silver tetradrachms of Philip V of Macedon, struck c.220-210bc. He evidently employed central European mercenar-ies to mount his unsuccessful resistance to Roman occupation, building on contacts established by his illustrious forebears. The early Alias series, which must have begun around the end of the third century, went on to develop into the almost typeless series known as ‘Mussels’ (71) after the termination of mercenary contact with the Mediterranean world. It came to an end during the second century bc, perhaps after c.150. Their authors evidently maintained far-flung contacts within the second-cen-tury Celtic world, for ‘Mussels’ are occasionally found far from their source, primarily in northern Italy, but also on the Atlantic coast of Caul, where they formed part of the great second-century Tayac hoard (Platę 8). Similar coins were found at Courcoury in Charente-Maritime. This wide geographical distribution may be a sign of troubled times in central Europę, an early manifestation of upheavals which culminated towards the end of the century in the

destructive excursions of the Cimbri and Teutones, who invaded Noricum in 113.

In the northernmost reaches of this ‘German’ Celtic zonę, around the middle and lower Elbę, a distinctive series also came into existence early in the second century, with various pictorial types such as cattle, a boar, or a running man, and often struck in denominations as smali as the tiny stater (72-3). Gold was evidently of very great value so far north, on the outer margins of the Celtic world, and such smali coins were perhaps eminently suited to the distribution of largesse.

Further south, the most westerly coinage of the middle central European area comprised smali gold fractions with a Janus-head obverse, produced to the east of Lakę Constance (74). The Janus head was derived from the Roman silver quadrigatus struck during the Second Punie War before the introduction of the denarius in 212, and it seems that the Celtic series was already in existence around the end of the third century, as specimens have tumed up in central European graves dated to the 220s-180s. It is, however, possible that the types of this coinage were a legacy of central European Celtic contact not directly with Romę, but with the Carthaginians in Italy during the Second Punk War, for Hannibal used many Celtic mercenaries. He could probably afford to strike little if any Punie coinage while in Italy, and instead may have paid his mercenary troops with whatever local Greek and Roman coins came to hand, supplemented by special issues such as the electrum coins of Capua, struck in 213, which themselves imitated the design of the quadrigatus. For routine payments, Roman quadri-gati were abundantly available from the coffers of Romę s disaffected allies. Thus, indirectly, they may have found their way into the territories of the mercenary-supplying warrior communities of central Europę during the Iast Medi terranean war in which large n urn bers of European mercenaries wereemployed.

This situation may also shed some light upon the derivation of the Bohemian Allds gold series described above, for its Athena-head obverse seems related to Roman or Romano-Campanian silvcr coins struck in 265-242, during the First Punk War. It is tempting to think that in both third-century conflicts with Romę, theCarthagnians, long familiar to Iberians, Ligurians, and Celts as mercenary employers, had some central European warriors in their pay. The Boii and their neighbours did have long-standing

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