2. SEVERVS
PIVS AVG,
head laureate r.
VICTORIAE AVGG, Septimius,
togate, bearded, seated front on curule chair, holding
Victory in r. hand, crowned by small
Victory flying in from the right; below on right, a naked captive presenting a
shield to the emperor, or possibly Aion holding up the
zodiac band.
Cohen 717 (
Vienna, 100 francs);
BMC 371-2, pl. 36.18, the illustrated specimen coming from the Trau Sale, lot 2064. A number of other specimens are also known, for example the one shown below from
CoinArchives; all specimens come from a single
rev. die, but from a number of different
obv. dies.
Date of issue? Well, the
obverse legend and
type of Septimius lasted from 201 to 210.
Mattingly,
BMC p. cxlviii, assigned the
type to 208, seeing a possible connection between fighting near the
Atlas Mountains in
Africa and
Atlas holding up the
zodiac in the
type.
Hill 1008 chose 209 and associated the
type with imperial victories in
Britain in that year.
Correct date: again apparently 206, since a shared
obverse die, illustrated below in Susan Headley's scan of my plaster casts, links this
VICTORIAE AVGG type to the famous
LAETITIA TEMPORVM type, spina of the
Circus Maximus fitted out as ship,
chariot race above, seven
animals below. This
type commemorates the
chariot races and animal hunts performed after the Saecular Games of 204, but it was struck two years later, in 206, mainly in the second half of the year, since Caracalla's coins of the
type pass from
his draped
bust (on
aurei) to
his laureate
head (
denarii), a change that occurred, as mentioned above, in the course of 206.
It seems to me very likely that these two
rare Victorious-Emperor
rev. types, one for Septimius, one for
Caracalla, both sharing the
rev. legend VICTORIAE AVGG, each struck from only a single
rev. die, both datable to 206 AD, were in fact struck together, as pendants to each other, in one and the same issue!
I think we do not know enough about the
history of 206 to decide whether these two
types commemorate some recent imperial
victory, possibly in
Africa or the East, or merely rehash the old
Parthian victory of 198. The
captives in Caracalla's
type do wear Phrygian caps, suitable for
Parthian enemies.
I will also leave open the question of interpretation of Septimius'
type: captive holding
shield, or Aion holding
zodiac?