Jérôme,
But the apparent
widening of the
palm tree's trunk by adding a third row of submarine-sandwich protuberances on the left, as was apparently done, would of course reduce the space between the emperor and the tree!
Since Judaea's
head has also apparently been re-engraved, I am not impressed by the slight shift in her position relative to the last A of CAPTA in the
legend.
The slight horizontal shift of the C of S C is already an admitted problem. Adding a possible further slight inconsistency on the vertical
axis (increased distance from the
exergue line) doesn't really add to your case.
So I remain convinced: it's the same die reworked by a modern restorer.
Not only are your postulated two
rev. dies very similar in many details, but they were both also combined with the same
obverse die: for Kraay's
Seaby coin showed the
rev. die of your
acsearch coin also coupled with the
obv. die of the reworked coin soon to be sold (Kraay's A52). This increases the likelihood that the
rev. of the reworked coin actually began as the same
rev. die, Kraay's P257, for that is certainly an authentic die combination, attested by another coin. Of course you can say that your hypothetical two
rev. dies were obviously
engraved sequentially by the same engraver, so might easily both have been employed with the same
obverse die!
You can also conclusively refute my thesis by finding another, untooled, coin struck from the same slightly different
rev. die as the coin soon to be auctioned! But I remain confident that such a coin will never turn up, because the supposed "variant"
rev. die is merely a modern tooler's enhancement of Kraay's P257.