It is interesting that this
mule occurs with two
portrait types,
head bare left as seen on the Dorotheum 2013 coin and on your coin in the thread's first entry, and now
head bare right!
It's
Vaillant not
Cohen that these coins vindicate, however. Between 1674 and 2013,
Vaillant was our only source for a
denarius of this
type, with unspecified
portrait direction, whether left or right.
Cohen was only citing
Vaillant, and
RIC and
BMC were only repeating Cohen's citation of
Vaillant.
One has to wonder whether
Vaillant was also right that there used to be a
FELICITAS AVG aureus of
Aelius in the
Paris collection. If so the coin ought to be described in the old manuscript catalogues of the royal
collection in the
Paris cabinet, including of course listings of the former ancient
gold coins in the
collection, which were all stolen and melted down in 1831.
The chief interest of these Aelius/FELICITAS
AVG mules is that they suggest that Hadrian's
FELICITAS AVG type, with
Felicitas standing left holding short
caduceus and
cornucopia, must belong to the year 137, since that was the only year during which coins were also struck for
Aelius Caesar. Maybe the same
Felicitas type was struck twice, first c. 132-3 near the beginning of the HADRIANVS
AVG COS III P P issue, and then again in 137, since the publishers of the Garrone
hoard noticed two shared
obverse dies between
sestertii bearing the same
FELICITAS AVG type and others bearing the
type FORTVNA AVG,
Fortuna standing left holding
patera and
cornucopia. That
FORTVNA AVG type was used early in the issue, however, since it was copied by Hadrian's
Eastern denarii, whose production seems to have ended fairly soon after the
mint of Rome's HADRIANVS
AVG COS III P P
denarii began arriving in
Asia Minor.