The emperor-officina assignments of the tetrarchic "
Salvis Avgg Et Caess Fel Kart"
Carthage type are interesting. Well, at least a little
bit interesting!
There were a number of issues of this
type for the initial
tetrarchy, then one for each of the subsequent line-ups. Starting with the last pre-abdication issue (
RIC VI Carthage 33-34), someone decided to make the
type even more "tetrarchic" by adding an "I" or "H" to the reverses, thereby noting the emperor on the
obverse either as a member of the eastern house of I(vpiter) or western house of H(ercules).
Of course these I/H
reverse markings needed to be paired with appropriate obverses, and mixing unintended pairings within a single
officina was asking for trouble, so the
mint rapidly chose to strictly assign each emperor to a different
officina (this didn't happen immediately since
Diocletian can be seen, unlisted, at multiple officinas).
As the tetrarchic line-up changed, with some
members leaving (e.g.
abdication) and others joining (new caesars), officinas needed to be reassigned. One obvious way to do this would have been to reassign freed officinas to new
members of
the tetrarchy, but we can see they didn't choose to do it this way, and instead *all* of the
officina assignments changed with each change of the tetrarchic line up, as shown in the table below.
On closer examination, we can see that the way officinas appear to have been assigned is on the basis of seniority, with more
senior members getting the lower
officina number/letter (e.g. A=1 for
Diocletian). We have three sets of changes after the initial assignments of
RIC 33-34:
1) After the
abdication of
Diocletian and
Maximianus, Constantius and
Galerius are now the
senior members and move up from officinas 3&4 to officinas 1&2, with the new caesars assigned the lowly 3&4, giving us
RIC 39-40
2) After the death of Constantius, the remaining three
members (
Galerius,
Severus and
Maximinus) move up to officinas 1-3, and newly recognized
Constantine becomes low
man on the totem pole at
officina 4, giving us
RIC 43-44
3) Finally, after
Maxentius usurps,
Carthage immediately stops recognizing
Galerius and
Severus, and add
Maxentius and
his co-usurper, Dad, to the line-up instead. Here we can really see the assignments by seniority at play. Herculius
Senior gets
officina #1,
Maximinus and
Constantine move up to officinas 2&3, and
Maxentius gets junior
officina #4, giving us
RIC 50-51.
What's interesting about this, given this pretty obvious assignment-by-seniority is what the actual pecking order was (at this fleeting point in time), with
Maximianus #1, and
Maxentius #4 behind
Constantine and
Maximinus.
From a collector's point of view these changing
officina assignments are great since they effectively "date" the coins to a given tetrarchic line-up. For example, if you have a
Constantine officina Delta you know if was issued by
Severus as
augustus, whereas if you have
officina Gamma you know it was issued by
Maxentius.
I'm using a coin I've
had a long time to illustrate the
type since it's uber-nice and deserves a second showing!
Ben
