The Trier Gold Hoard

On the afternoon of 9 September 1993 an excavator digging out a new car park beside a hospital in Trier's Feldstraße bit into the cellar of a Roman town house and ripped apart a bronze cauldron. Gold coins spilled into the spoil. Archaeologists from the state museum had been recording walls on the site, but it was coin collectors watching the work who first spotted the aurei glinting in the dirt.

What followed was a small gold rush. Lorry-loads of spoil had already gone to be dumped as fill for a hotel car park elsewhere in Trier, and the rumour travelled with them: by evening builders, drivers and hotel guests were sifting the earth and recovering more than 400 coins, along with the upper half of the cauldron. Back at the Feldstraße, an amateur with a metal detector returned that night and found a clotted heap of about 1,400 aurei and the bottom of the pot, still holding several hundred more. He took them home in a bucket and a plastic bag and handed them in to the museum the next morning.

In the end nineteen people delivered 2,518 coins, and it is thought that a few rare pieces were quietly kept back. The original hoard is reckoned at about 2,650 aurei, some 18.5 kg of almost pure gold: 2,650 aurei were worth 265,000 sesterces, more than a year's salary for the senior imperial finance officer based in Trier.

The coins span more than a century, from Nero's reforms of AD 64 to the reign of Septimius Severus. Nearly all were struck at Rome, the rest at Lyon, and Nero and Vespasian dominate because their lighter aurei stayed in circulation long after heavier issues were melted down. The series stops abruptly in 167/168, and only six coins of 193-196 were added much later. One reading is that the pot was first buried in the panic of the Antonine Plague, dug up and topped up decades later, and finally abandoned during the civil war of 196, when the army of Clodius Albinus besieged Trier. Whether it was private wealth or a public or military chest, perhaps connected with a nearby temple of Asclepius, is unknown.

For numismatists the hoard is a reference collection in itself. It contains about 80 previously unknown types and variants and roughly a tenth of all known aurei of its period, and the full publication by Karl-Josef Gilles appeared in 2013.

The hoard became a target in its own right. In the early hours of 8 October 2019 thieves broke into the Landesmuseum and tried to smash the armoured glass of its case. They failed and fled; one man was later extradited from the Netherlands and sentenced in 2021 to three years in prison, while his accomplices were not found.