Can someone confirm this as a RIC VII Heraclea 93,
on Helvetica's it should have a "plain, ladder shaped diadem with dots",
but I haven't found one with the diadem as mine.
Your coin is
RIC 94 - that's a classic rosette diadem with alternating pairs of laurel leaves and rosettes, with a larger brooch-like element at the forehead.
RIC VII does a horrible job of classifying diadems, lumping them all into the plain/pearl/rosette categories. The reality is that at
Heraclea alone there are around a dozen diadem variations of one degree or another (none of which are pearl).
I think what
RIC was trying to capture (or at least should have been trying to) with the basic plain vs rosette dichotomy is the fact that when the diadem was first introduced it was of one structural form - either a plain band, or of a boxy (ladder-like) construction - these all being "plain" diadems, then a few years later it switched to a different structural form - the laurel and rosette with forehead brooch-like element, this being the "rosette" diadem (referred to in
RIC VIII, where it sees continued usage, as "laurel & rosette" diadem). On Constantine's gold and silver coinage these early/plain and later/rosette forms are quite distinct.
The trouble is that on Constantine's bronze coinage - especially at the eastern mints surrounding
Constantinople - there are a very large variety of "plain" diadems (some with components that, absent guidance from
RIC, one might think could/should be described as "rosettes"), and secondly the transition from plain to true rosette diadems involves a number of transitional forms that therefore don't fully belong in either category.
Ben
