Good question to which I wish I
had some clue. It's similar to the
Brutus "
LEIBERTAS"
denarius in that the spellings are different than they are later. My suspicion is that the
Romans were
still sort of working out spellings and the like. I believe it was Suetonius who noted that
Claudius introduced some new characters for use in the Latin
alphabet and that were then adopted. Latin of the era seemed to be in a state of some flux.
As an edit, I should note another possibility. In some much later imperial coins that were struck in areas of
Greece, some of the legends were garbled because the Greek speakers who were cutting the dies simply did not understand Latin sufficiently well. I don't know if that would be the case with the Antony or
Brutus coins; I would
still tend toward the first possibility.
Best,
Larry
