The occasion of Sylviane Estiot's article in
Revue Numismatique 2004, pp. 210-18, was the rediscovery in 2003 of the then unique coin of this usurper in the
collection of a museum in Nantes.
The coin
had been dug up in a
French hoard on 28 Nov. 1900 and published in
Rev. Num. 1901, illustrated by a line drawing. In 1929 the whole
hoard was donated to the Nantes museum by the adopted son of the hoard's excavator and original owner.
A plaster
cast of the
Domitianus was made and is illustrated in
RIC V.2, 1933, pl. XX.12.
Until this point the coin
had been accepted as authentic, but the balance tipped the other way when
Elmer failed to include the coin (or even mention it) in
his Münzprägung der gallischen
Kaiser of 1942, and when Laffranchi condemned it as a remade
Tetricus I in Rivista ital. di num. 1942. It didn't
help that since the 1930s the coin itself could no longer be found at the Nantes museum!
In the Swiss Num. Review 1997, working from the image in
RIC,
Marcus Weder rehabilitated the coin, arguing that it was unquestionably authentic, and seemed to combine an
obv. in the
style of the Gallic Empire's
Mint 2 with a
rev. in the
style of
Mint 1.
Weder suggested that the dies
had been recut for
Domitianus in
antiquity, originally having shown
Victorinus with
rev. Salus.
On the basis of the rediscovered coin, which has now passed into the
French national
collection in
Paris,
Estiot confirms Weder's rehabilitation of the coin, showing that it is unquestionably ancient and unaltered, not remade as Laffranchi asserted. She confirms Weder's dating of the piece to between
Victorinus and
Tetricus I, but refutes
his suggestion that the dies were recut from
Victorinus; rather they seem to have been freshly created for the usurper himself. On a
rare early coin of
his reign,
Tetricus I copied the
Concordia rev. type of the usurper, changing the
legend however from
CONCORDIA MILITVM to
CONCORDIA AVG.
As to the historical circumstances,
Domitianus was apparently a rival of
Tetricus I for the position of Gallic emperor after the assassination of
Victorinus.
Estiot points out that
Tetricus, as a
Roman senator and governor of Aquitania, was not the army commander that one would have expected to succeed to the throne. Tetricus' early coins honoring Divus
Victorinus seem to reveal weakness, the need to claim legitimacy from attachment to
his predecessor, just as both
Quintillus and
Aurelian had struck coins for Divus
Claudius II a couple of years earlier.
Zosimus says that Aurelian's difficulties c. 271 AD provoked the apparition of three usurpers, including a
Domitianus who is probably identical with the
man on the coin. He might also be the same
Domitianus who is mentioned in the
Historia Augusta as a commander under Gallienus' general
Aureolus.
The appearance of a second specimen of Domitianus'
antoninianus, from the same die pair, in a
hoard found near
Oxford in April 2003, has confirmed Weder's and Estiot's vindication of the original coin. This second specimen is presented in a note by Richard
Abdy of the BM following Estiot's article.