The Lewis Collection of Late Roman Solidi in the Fitzwilliam Museum

Abstract

This paper is a comparative study of 19 Late Roman solidi from the private collection of the reverend Samuel Savage Lewis, librarian of Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge. The solidi were mainly acquired by Lewis from various antiquarian dealers in Europe in 1873–1883, with Lewis keeping records of the acquisitions. The solidi of the Lewis Collection were donated to Corpus Christi College in 1891. They have been kept in the Fitzwilliam Museum since 1991 and most are now published for the first time. The aim of this paper is to situate the solidi in their antiquarian context and explore the problematic surrounding collections of decontextualized solidi. Do the individual solidi in the Lewis Collection have sufficient provenance to attempt a recontextualization? May one assign a possible origin and historical background to them? Can they be used to theorize about the relative frequency of die-links in coin hoards and numismatic collections? To answer these questions, the solidi in the Lewis Collection have been examined for die-links with find coins from Italy and Scandinavia, but also decontextualized solidi from eighteenth and nineteenth century Swedish collections. The result shows that only two solidi in the Lewis Collection are die-linked to the Scandinavian find material, and none to the decontextualized solidi in the Swedish collections. There are many die-links connecting Italian and Scandinavian find coins, but they also link to decontextualized solidi in Swedish collections. This suggests that solidi in Swedish collections are indeed local find coins from Scandinavia. They can thus be employed in comparative research on Italian and Scandinavian find coins.