Out of curiosity, how did you narrow it down to
Avitus and
Johannes? (It could be that the "E" in the left
field narrows it down to only one or two emperors, I don't recall. I actually have one or more of the
rev. type with that
field mark. I've mentioned it before, but for the past 20 years I've been holding onto my big bags of tiny unidentified VLRBCs, or Very Late
Roman Bronze Coins, for which I'm SO close to IDing a great
rarity...but never get there. So if you can make it, that'll
help me
cross some off my list!)
Like the
SALVS REIPVBLICAE (& ...CE)
reverse from your other post, this
reverse type /
legend (or close variants) was used by a bunch of the very late
Roman Emperors, including also
scarce &
rare ones like
Theodosius II,
Valentinian III, and
Majorian. Depending on the number of G's at the end of the
reverse legend,
types were struck for
Theodosius I,
Honorius,
Arcadius,
Valentinian II. I'm sure others as well. (And there were
contemporary "barbarian"/tribal imitations.)
The challenge of VLRBCs is that these tiny AE4s hardly ever have
complete enough legends to be sure whose name they were struck under. That's why people will pay quite the large premium for any
Johannes,
Majorian, or
Avitus with enough
legend to be indisputable, and occasionally tremendous amounts for a
complete legend.
In some cases, people have raised doubts about whether the coin
types existed or are actually known at all (see, for example, Ras Suarez's 2014 essay on "The
Avitus AE Problem" -- on
his blog
[LINK] -- by which he is actually referring to a much more general problem than just coins of that single ruler.)
Yours does have the "look" (
style,
fabric) of one of the later ones. Most of Theo I,
Val II,
Honorius and
Arcadius are of better
style, but some of the
Arcadius AE4s (maybe others, too) were hastily and crudely struck. The Theo II (struck under
Johannes) and
Val III have this kind of appearance.
Again, if anything narrows it down (besides an outright die match on the
portrait), I assume it'll be the "E" fieldmark left. (But, of course, I'd
still be wondering if others used it too and we just don't have specimens
good enough to know yet.)