The Vierordt coin you ask about is laureate,
draped,
cuirassed right, as
RIC 525c states, so of course is not your specimen.
Paris also has a specimen of the same coin, misreported by
Cohen 273 =
RIC 525d as having AVREL in
obv. legend and
bust laureate, draped r. only, when in fact the
obv. legend has
AVR and the
bust is laureate, draped,
cuirassed right. It is from the same dies as the Vierordt piece. So
RIC 525c and d are the same coin.
The variant you have,
obv. FELIX and
bust laureate,
cuirassed right (not draped) is not in
Cohen or
RIC. But I have plaster casts of two such specimens (
Rome ex
Gnecchi,
Budapest), and I note three in
CoinArchives Pro: one in two
CNG sales, another (
tooled) in several
Gorny & Mosch sales, and your coin, ex Bertolami 12, 29 Oct. 2014, lot 862.
Four of these five specimens are from the same die pair as each other. Yours is from the same
rev. die (the only die for this
Adlocutio type dated TR P XVII), but from a different
obv. die, which may be otherwise unknown to me. Among my plaster casts, in any case, there is no other coin from this
obv. die, with
Adlocutio or any other
rev. type.
The bimetallic, overweight
flan of your piece of course gives it a medallic
quality. I would conjecture that it was produced as a New Year's gift for 1 Jan. 214 AD. Most second-cent. bronze medallions, as I showed in my Date and Purpose of Medallions paper, seem to have been struck for use as New Year's gifts, and a
good number of them were bimetallic.
Caracalla issued no large bronze medallions at all during
his sole reign, but he did produce a small number of bimetallic
sestertii in 213, 214, and 215. The title
FELIX on your coin would seem to indicate that it was struck early in 214, from an old
obverse die that
had originally been
engraved in 213. On
denarii,
FEL was superseded by
GERM before the end of 213.
