I saw a coin for sale on
ebay, listed as a
sestertius of
Julia Domna, but it didn't look right to me. Besides the strange
obverse legend style (mostly unreadable), the listing said the coin was struck between 141 and 161 AD (
Julia Domna was born in 160 AD). Clearly, the description was wrong.
I could only make out some of the
obverse legend, but none of it looked like the
style of any
Julia Domna legend I
had seen. I went to
Wildwinds and looked at the
obverse legend on every single
Julia Domna coin they have listed - and there are a lot of them. I knew ahead of time that I wouldn't find this
legend or coin as a
Julia Domna, but I wanted to be sure before I emailed the seller to share what I found.
Because the only letters in the
legend that were clear to me were in the sequence "SCILL", I came back here to
Forum and looked for any coins of women with that letter sequence in her name, and sure enough...there it was:
Herennia EtruSCILLa, the wife of
Trajan Decius. I took that name back to
Wildwinds and found the coin with the correct
obverse,
reverse, and legends.
Without disclosing the seller's name, all of this surprised me because he has almost 4000 feedbacks with a 100% rating. I would expect much more from someone by that point.
To those of you who do this kind of research daily, with serious gusto, my hat is off to you - what a chore this was! Here is the coin in question:
