You are welcome, friends! I enjoy investigating and
writing about numismatic questions myself, in order to clarify my thoughts about them!
Here, from a notecard I wrote several decades ago and my recent reconsultation of many of the same works, is a concise
history of our knowledge of the
VOTIS FELICIBVS type on the medallions of
Commodus.
First publication, from a specimen in the Medici
Collection, Florence, a brief description of the
rev. type only, without interpretation: Vaillant's book on
rare Roman bronze coins, 1674, p. 219.
First interpretation, based on a
fine specimen in the
collection of the Duke of Devonshire, Haym, The British Treasury II,
London 1720, known to me through Khell's Latin translation of 1764, pp. 297-9 and pl. 36.8: according to Haym the
type shows the undertaking of vows for the safe departure and journey of Commodus' new African grain fleet, whose establishment by
Commodus to supplement the grain supply provided by the existing
Egyptian grain fleet is mentioned in the
Historia Augusta. Haym failed to recognize the figure of Serapis piloting one of the
ships, and did not identiify the
man performing the sacrifice as the emperor.
Eckhel, Doctrina 7, 1796, p. 129; Heer, Der historische Wert der
vita Commodi, 1901, p. 107; and
Strack,
Antoninus Pius, 1937, p. 159, all essentially followed Haym's interpretation: in their eyes the
medallion depicted the launching and first voyage of Commodus' African grain fleet. Even
CNG still followed this interpretation in their commentary on Beachcomber's piece in their online store earlier this year.
Vogt, Die alexandrinischen Münzen, Stuttgart 1924, pp. 154-6, made great advances: he recognized Serapis steering one of the freighters, and accordingly identified it as an
Egyptian grain ship; he saw that the freighters were ENTERING rather than leaving the harbor; he identified the harbor as that of
Ostia; he saw that the
PIO IMP OMNIA FELICIA
type must be referring to the same event as the
VOTIS FELICIBVS type, because of the shared theme, successful vows relating to the sea and
ships, and because of their joint use of the special, shortened
obv. legend for medallions of 190; and finally he correctly identified the event referred to as the relief of the famine which
had led to the death of Cleander in 189! In just one small respect
Vogt still followed Haym: he thought that the second freighter, above the
legend, might indeed represent the new AFRICAN grain fleet, which would thus also have contributed to the relief of the famine, and would of course have to have been founded before 189, since the
medallion showed it already in action in that year.
Kaiser-Raiss, Münzprägung...des
Commodus,
Frankfurt 1980, p. 41, essentially followed
Vogt, even quoting
his conjecture that the second freighter might represent the new African grain fleet. Like myself above, Kaiser-Raiss claimed to have observed a single short-legend
medallion obv. die that was used for the three
types VOTIS FELICIBVS,
PIO IMP OMNIA FELICIA, and TR P XV Consular
quadriga; but the
PIO IMP medallion that she illustrates on pl. 21.5 is actually from a different
obv. die than the illustrated pieces with the other two
types, pl. 21. 1 and 3.
I too have essentially followed
Vogt, except that I see no reason to identify the upper freighter as African rather than
Egyptian! New in my presentation are only
(1) the firm dating of the medallions of 190 to a New Year's issue, therefore designed and produced late in 189, increasing the likelihood that the odd
obv. legend and the two
rev. types in question indeed refer to the famine of 189. That the imperial titles on medallions prove that most of them must have been New Year's issues was my own discovery, in my
Oxford B.Litt. thesis of 1972.
(2) Observation of a real die link between those two
rev. types and the XV
Quadriga type, though one of the links is so far dependent on Dardel's drawing of a
medallion in
Paris, rather than an actual photograph or plaster
cast of the piece!
(3) I believe I am the first to suggest that not only the two
rev. types in question, but also the strange and hitherto unexplained variant
obv. legend on the medallions of 190, were meant to reflect Commodus' role in overcoming the famine of 189.
One
complete miss, in my view: A. Alföldi, in
his book A Festival of Isis,
Budapest 1937, pp. 48-9, thought that the
VOTA PVBLICA Isis coins of the fourth century AD proved that by then the festival of launching the ship of Isis, marking the opening of the sea to travel and transport by ship,
had strangely been moved back from March 5 to January 3 and
had merged with the ceremony of public vows on that day. According to Alföldi, the
VOTIS FELICIBVS type of
Commodus depicts not the arrival of grain freighters from
Egypt and
Africa, as
Vogt thought, but instead the ceremony of the opening of the seas, presided over exceptionally by Serapis instead of Isis; and the vows mentioned in the
legend must be the annual
VOTA PVBLICA of 3 January 190! Conclusion: "The fusion of the imperial vows with the cult of
Isis and Serapis then was already
complete under
Commodus." I, like most other scholars, am totally not convinced.