QUOTE(Drusus @ Aug 27 2007, 02:56 AM)
Interesting, I have heard about this practice. There was a discussion about it in another forum and I think some were wondering how one can tell it is actual damnatio. For instance you find a coin that has been scatched across the portrait...or in this case, a chunk with inscription is missing...how do you conclude it is not just, like so many modern and ancient coins, someone just defacing coinage for one reason or another. Just wondering how you determine this...
It's a very valid point you raise. There is no way of telling if it is official damnatio (i.e as decreed by the senate) or unofficial, people basically removing his name unofficially. Defacing the coinage would i presume be considered treason (if one was caught that is), however, since Nero was an official enemy of the state after 68 it would be not a problem to deface the coinage (practically encouraged), so in some ways it would be a form of damnatio, either official or unofficial.
With this particular coin only the name of Nero has been removed. Now i'm not certain what the rate of literacy was in 1st century Rome, I presume that even if people couldn't read (as we would define it) they would be able to recognise a name, so the fact that it's merely his name that has been cut out does not rule out the plebs.
However, according to Tacitus, Nero was rather popular with the lower classes so it's improbable that they would strike out against him in such a way (but of course that might be naive, because people are individuals not a consensus). The people that really despised Nero though were the Patrician and Senatorial classes (as is so often the case) and it was they who ostracised Nero in the first place.
I would have thought that if it had been the lower orders then they probably would have defaced his portrait, the focus here though is clearly just on the written word. The biggest evidence i think in favour of damnatio is the fact that they've clipped a good chunk of the coin out. Now correct me if i'm wrong but i presume that these coins were accepted on weight (as well as shape/size), cutting that much out must reduce the value of the coin considerably. Now presuming it's contemporary (and that's another minefield), why would anyone (especially lower orders of society) deface a coin to the extent of reducing it's value or even making it perhaps unacceptable in commerce. A modern example would be taking a $50 bill and tearing off a fifth of it and hoping you could still spend the 4/5ths you had left. If you really needed the money, you wouldn't do it, you might resort to writing a sly comment upon it or make it look like the President is smoking a pipe, but you'd never make it difficult to recirculate to note.
)
like some1 was hungry an bit off part of it 
