>>509966712
>Some people argue that Rome never really collapsed but it was pretty damn close.
Coinage is a perfect testimony of this. Back during the early republic days, roman coinage was beautiful, you could clearly feel the greek influence, and the denarii's composition was almost pure silver.
Fast forward the late empire days, it's uber ugly doodles made hastily, not different than later bizantine coinage, and they still call it "silver" coins, but purity is down to few %, at the end as low as a 1% flimsy coating.
And thourough the dynasties you can visibly see the progressive degrading of the coinage in both quality and purity.
But at least they still had coinage, and pure copper in their lower denomination. In the EU, we get iron coins microplated with copper lol, and the value of our currency is so low we already cancelled the 1 & 2 cents because even minting fucking worthless iron is more expensive than the value it carries...

Truth is there is no coming back from a civilizational decay. Only another one taking it's place eventually. And right now, we are FAR past the point of the terminal decay of the roman empire back in 500 AD. It's just that until now, nobody was up to the task to end our miserable rotten judeocracy.

Here as a fellow frog i'm sharing a rarity with you fren. The lugdunum sesterce made to celebrate the construction of the new roman administrative capitale of the empire : Lyon, featuring the newly built autel de Lyon, with statues representing all the gauls' tribes. Only 15 of those still exist, and out of them, 13 are in museums (mostly the british museum, BNF, Harvard art museum, münzkabinett of Berlin & US numismatic society).
Minted in 10 AD, and we already are far from the greek coinage, quality wise.