In The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts there's a room with an impressive collection of artifacts from ancient Greece and Rome. One of the more interesting of those is a collection of coins minted by rulers of various ancient city-states as well as Roman and Byzantine emperors. There are about thirty coins ordered chronologically in a single row, and as soon as you see it you think, how's that for inflation. As you move forward in time, the coins get progressively smaller and show more visible signs of corrosion. In the younger coins, the corrosion also gets greener, suggesting that the proportion of copper used to make the coins was getting larger. Here's what the oldest coins looked like:
And here are the youngest ones:
Of course, all this could just be coincidence, or bias, either in the sample or in my perception (since they once taught me in school there was massive inflation in the latest years of the Roman empire). Who cares; it's much more fun to think it is what I think it is.
And here are the youngest ones:
Of course, all this could just be coincidence, or bias, either in the sample or in my perception (since they once taught me in school there was massive inflation in the latest years of the Roman empire). Who cares; it's much more fun to think it is what I think it is.
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