Great coin Adrian. I used to own the matching
Caracalla:
https://www.forumancientcoins.com/gallery/displayimage.php?pid=106104Here's the notes that
Curtis provided for the
type:
ANTONINVS
PIVS AVGLaureate
head of
Caracalla right
LAETITIA TEMPORVMThe spina of the
Circus Maximus decorated as a ship facing l., with the turning posts at its prow and stern, a sail mounted on the central obelisk, and the spina's other monuments visible in between; above the ship, four quadrigas racing l.; below, seven
animals: an ostrich at l. and bear at r.; between them a
lion and a lioness chasing a wild ass and a
panther attacking a bison.
Rome 206 AD
3.34g
Ex-Londinium coins, Ex Professor K.D. White with original envelope.
Sear 6813,
RIC 157,
BMCRE 257, CSS 793
Very
rare! Only 2 examples in the
Reka Devnia hoardBetter in hand
Notes by
Curtis Clay:
This famous
type commemorates the
chariot races and animal
hunt that took place on the seventh and final day of
Severus' Saecular Games in 204 AD, as described in the inscriptional acts of those games which were found in
Rome in the 1870s and 1930s. According to the acts, after three days of sacrifices and three days of honorary stage shows,
Severus and
Caracalla held
circus games on the seventh day, consisting of
chariot races and then a
hunt of 700 beasts, 100 each of "lions, lionesses, panthers, bears, bisons, wild
asses, ostriches". Dio Cassius describes the same
hunt, adding the detail that the cage from which the
animals were discharged was formed like a boat: "The entire receptacle in the theater
had been fashioned in the shape of a boat and was capable of receiving or discharging four hundred beasts at once; and then, as it suddenly fell apart, there came rushing forth bears, lionesses, panthers, lions, ostriches, wild
asses, bisons, so that 700 beasts in all, both wild and domesticated, at one and the same time were seen running about and were slaughtered. For to correspond with the duration of the festival, which lasted seven days, the number of the
animals was also seven times one hundred." In Dio's text this passage follows directly on
his account of
Severus' Decennalian Games in 202 AD, causing scholars to accuse Dio of misdating the
hunt or to postulate that similar hunts of 700
animals were held both in 202 and in 204. But the true explanation, in my opinion, is that Dio's
Byzantine epitimator Xiphilinus, on whom we are dependent for this section of Dio's text, has simply jumped without warning or transition from Dio's description of the Decennalian Games of 202 to
his description of the
circus spectacle concluding the Saecular Games of 204. This hypothesis easily explains why Dio's text as we have it makes no mention of the Saecular Games themselves or of any event of 203: Xiphilinus omitted this whole section of Dio's
history! The seven kinds of
animals named by both Dio and the inscriptional acts are also depicted in the coin
type: on
good specimens, especially the
aureus BM pl. 34.4, the ostrich and the bear are clear, the
lion has a mane, the ass has long ears, the bison has horns and a hump. Two large felines remain, of which we may suppose that the one accompanying the
lion is the lioness and the one attacking the bison is the
panther. The
animals are named somewhat differently in
Cohen,
BMC, and other numismatic works: though numismatists have long cited Dio's text to explain the coin
type, no one previously seems to have posed the question whether the seven
animals in the lower
part of the
type might not be the same seven that Dio and now the inscriptional acts too name! These
circus games with the ship and 700
animals were held in 204 AD, but the coin
type commemorating them did not appear until two years later: on
aurei of Septimius the
type is die linked to a dated
type of 206 AD, and for
Caracalla the
type passes from a draped and
cuirassed obverse type on the
aureus to the "
head only"
type on
his denarii, a transition that took place in 206 AD according to
his dated coins.
SOLD October 2014