What Roman Coins Reveal About the People Who Made Them

I always imagined teams of 2 working the forge. One man to hold the reverse, or "punch," die; a second struck down a hammer. The obverse, or "anvil," die was set into the anvil. That's what I gathered from the denarius of Titus Carisius, for instance: one hammer and one set of tongs, so two workmen. Maybe I'm mistaken. One thing I've wondered is how many mint men were required to supply the whole Empire. There was some good info about the tens of thousands required to mine the metals that went into coins. But how about the size of the labor force required to physically hammer out these circles of metal? For the minting process itself, the inscriptional evidence might be our best evidence. 63 men are listed - were they all employed at once, then? Interestingly, 63 is divisible by 3. Did it take 21 teams? For such a far-reaching endeavor, 63 people isn't much at all. Then again, for such a high-stakes position, the steps taken to secure both the labor and materials must've given these guys a high bar to meet. Perhaps even a bit of clout, even if only within the ranks of the servi publici.

Interesting article/excerpt, but like >95% of it is disconnected from the title. The first half is basically a historical tale relating where the word 'money' comes from.

TLDR:

- A single list of names from 115 AD/CE reveals that about half the people at the mint were slaves.

- The dies used were hand cut with simple chisel tools and no magnification (lenses) available, so they must have been masters of the craft who would probably become nearsighted by the end of their careers.

- It took 3 people to actually stamp each coin (1 for upper die, 1 for lower die, 1 to hammer), so there were likely many teams of 3 in the mint, given the amount of coins produced.