These
sestertii of
Titus Augustus in 79 and 80 (
RIC 55-7, 133-5) and of
Domitian Caesar in 79 only (
RIC 58-60) were first noticed by
Colin Kraay in
his Oxford dissertation on the
Flavian bronze coinage (1953);
Kraay considered them to be a stop-gap issue of the
mint of
Rome, struck from dies cut by precious metal engravers.
Carradice and Buttrey, in their revision of
RIC II (2007), followed Kraay's
attribution of these coins to
Rome, and added a very interesting
sestertius of Divus
Vespasian with
IVDAEA CAPTA reverse (
RIC 369, pl. 108), which obviously belongs to the same counterclockwise-legend issue, though
Carradice and Buttrey wrongly just added it to Divus Vespasian's
standard Rome-mint bronze coins. When
writing up the Harry Sneh
Collection of
Flavian coins (Gemini IX, 2012, lot 448), however, a more likely explanation of these
rare sestertii occurred to me: they would seem to have been the
first coins of
Titus and Domitian's Thracian
mint for
sestertii, middle bronzes, and smaller bronzes,
RIC Titus 498-514,
Domitian 831-40. Since I notice from a recent
Forvm post of FlaviusDomitianus that
Ian Carradice still seems to be following Kraay's mistaken
attribution of these coins to the
mint of
Rome, I thought it might be useful to repeat here my arguments from the Harry Sneh write-up:
Colin Kraay in
his unpublished
Oxford dissertation of 1953 was the first to notice a small group of
sestertii of
Titus Augustus and
Domitian Caesar in 79 and 80, characterized above all by obverses of
Titus that resemble those of
his aurei and
denarii as
Augustus, with small
portraits in the precious-metal
style and an
obverse legend including
VESPASIAN and arranged counterclockwise, as on the
Roman gold and silver, whereas the
standard bronzes of
Titus as
Augustus used clockwise
obverse legends with the shorter abbreviation
VESP.
Ian Carradice and Ted Buttrey in their new edition of
RIC II, nos. 55-60 and 133-135, have added a few new
types to this issue (the next lot adds another,
Titus in
quadriga), and have also published a
sestertius of Divus
Vespasian,
RIC 369, pl. 108, which contrary to the authors'
attribution clearly also belongs to this issue, first because of its counterclockwise
obverse legend, which idiosyncratically reads
DIVVS AVGVSTVS VESPASIAN PATER PAT, and secondly because of its
IVDAEA CAPTA reverse type copied from
sestertii of
Vespasian in 71, a
type which is otherwise attested for
Titus as
Augustus only on
sestertii of the issue in question, namely
RIC 133 of 80 AD like the present lot and
RIC 57 of 79 AD. Now
Kraay, as
RIC states without either approval or disagreement (p. 184), "proposed that these few bronzes were produced by the precious metal
mint (at
Rome) as a stop-gap issue," the bronze
mint perhaps being preoccupied with preparing new dies for the reign of
Titus. In
writing up the present lot and the next one for this sale, however, the cataloguer (
Curtis Clay) has reached a different opinion, namely that these
rare sestertii may be the earliest two issues (late 79 and early 80 respectively) of Titus' Thracian
mint, since they already used the two favorite
reverse types of that
mint,
PAX AVGVST standing left and
Mars advancing right with
trophy over shoulder. There are indeed strong stylistic similarities, pointed out by
Kraay, between
PAX AVGVST reverse dies of the two series, for example
RIC pl. 90, 58b ("
Rome") and pl. 115, 507 (
Thrace). Two further points favoring this reattribution are (a) the flat
fabric of the reverses of these
sestertii, noticed by Harry Sneh, which is characteristic of the Thracian
mint, whereas
Roman bronzes usually
had concave reverses (
RPC II, p. 87) and (b) the appearance on the market since 1990, possibly from the Balkans, of five new specimens of these
rare coins, namely the two in this sale, the duplicate of the next lot mentioned in its description, and
RIC 55 and 135. If these are really the earliest Thracian
sestertii of Titus' reign, then we should probably suppose that the Thracian
mint was originally staffed in late 79 AD with engravers transferred from the precious-metal
mint at
Rome, who on their earliest Thracian bronzes naturally reproduced the
style of that
mint and also copied the direction of the
obverse legends and the form
VESPASIAN for
Titus from the gold and silver of
Rome.
