Aurelian or Alice?

---------- Interesting Things About Ancient Coins ----------

Aurelian or Alice? The long-necked emperor

Alice took a bite of the left-hand side of the caterpillar's mushroom, and her neck grew so long that she was mistaken for a serpent. Could this be what happened to the emperor Aurelian?

This series of bronze antoniniani shows how stylised some portraits of emperors became on their coins. We start with a short, thick neck and a fairly normal shaped head, and end with a long, long thin neck with a weird egg-shaped head! Click on each coin image to see more details of the coin.

These coins were all originally plated or coated with a thin layer of silver, and some of this survives on some of them. The second from the left has almost all of its silvering and is still shiny (making it hard to photograph well), whereas the third from the right has none at all left. This would have made the coins glitter beautifully when they were fresh from the mint, but the precious illusion would soon, quite literally, wear thin.

The sequence on this page was designed for amusement rather than education. An expert would look at which mints produced which coins, and exactly when. There are some excellent web resources on Aurelian, and if you want to research that sort of detail, you could start with this boutique on my "useful links" page.

In fact, the coins line up like this, from left to right:
1. From Cyzicus, 272-273 CE.
2. From Antioch, 272-273 CE.
3. From Ticinum, 274 CE.
4. From Mediolanum, 271-272 CE.
5. From Cyzicus, 274-275 CE.
6. Also from Cyzicus, 274-275 CE.
So there isn't really any specific artistic development shown here, just a generally increasing tendency to stylise the design, with Mediolanum (Milan) apparently being ahead of the other mints.

The content of this page was last updated on 28 December 2008