Priscus,
I
had never seen Roger Bland's nos. 7-8 either, but he
had entered them on
his list of official coins, from which he would obviously have tried to exclude
plated ancient
forgeries, and now he has sent me pictures of the two coins, reproduced below, which seem to confirm
his judgement.
The
Pax AVGVSTI piece is in
Rome ex
Gnecchi Coll.;
VIRTVS AVG in
Yale from the
Dura Europos excavations, no. 1248 with photo in the Final Report.
Both coins look official to me, and in a way they confirm each other, since they both copy official
types of the same issue, but shorten their
rev. legends in a similar way. How likely is it that an ancient counterfeiter would himself have
had the idea to shorten the two official
rev. legends, or that two counterfeiters should each have
had that same idea independently?
Roger Bland's own opinion on re-examining the photos: "Looking at them again, I’d say the
obv. of the
Dura coin definitely looks regular; I am much less sure about the
PAX AVGVSTI coin, but I’d want to spend more time checking the
obv. die before reaching a verdict."
However, I was mistaken about the
obv. legend of these two coins: both have P M at the end of the
obv. legend, as Roger's list correctly indicates, not below the
bust, as I was wrongly thinking. That fact suggests a return to Roger Bland's order of the three issues, rather than the opposite order that I proposed above.
Issues 1 and 2:
Obv. legend first with P M below
bust (Issue 1), then with P M moved to end of
obv. legend (Issue 2), each issue using the same three
rev. types with their longer legends. I agree that P M probably stands for Parthicus or Persicus
Maximus, but think that the placement of these two letters below the
bust emphasizes rather than diminishes their importance. It's hard to think of a parallel in any other early imperial issue, except for P D for
Primi Decennales being placed below Commodus'
bust on
sestertius obv. dies in 186 (
BMC p. 808).
Amictus suggests that P M was added later to a large batch of Philip's
obv. dies that
had originally been
engraved without those letters, but I prefer to think that P M was deliberately placed below the
bust from the beginning, in order to stress the importance of the new title. Two minor points that tend to confirm my and Roger's suggested sequence of these two issues: as stated in my previous post a commoner issue will usually have followed a scarcer one, and the issue with P M at end of
obv. legend is about five times as common as that with P M below
bust. Second, the engravers may simplify a
type as time progresses. As
Doug Smith pointed out on
Forum on 31 Aug. 2009, the
VIRTVS EXERCITVS type usually shows Virtus' spear with barbed point downwards in the P M below
bust issue, but omits the barbs of the spear point in the issue with P M in
obv. legend.
Issue 3: The same three
rev. types continued, but with their legends shortened to
PAX AVGVSTI,
VIRTVS AVG, and the hypothetical SPES AVGVSTI. Perhaps hostilities with the Persians were threatening to break out again, so the
legend PAX FVNDATA CVM PERSIS was shortened to just
PAX AVGVSTI, and the other two
rev. legends too were shortened for stylistic reasons. The
obv. dies continued to include P M in the
legend, confirming that with the longer
rev. legends too that form (Issue 2)
had followed the form with P M below
bust (Issue 1). issue 3
had hardly gotten under way, however, before this entire series was discontinued. The
portraits of the two surviving coins no longer resemble
Gordian III, confirming that this issue followed Issues 1-2 rather than preceding them as I suggested above.