Featured Coin


A Septimius Severus Drachm from Caesarea, Cappadocia

What collectors call Greek Imperial coins were the issues of Greek cities as part of the Roman Empire. The vast majority of these show an obverse portrait of the Emperor or some member of his family. The reverse was available for subjects of local interest and varied greatly from place to place. Most cities issued only bronze coins with their precious metal requirements being met by the regular Roman Imperial denominations. A few special cities were granted the honor of a local coinage in silver. One was Caesarea in Cappadocia. The coins of Caesarea under Septimius Severus were dated with the Greek numeral for the year of the reign starting with 'B' for year two. The absence of year one might suggest that Caesarea did not declare allegiance to Severus in his war with Pescennius Niger until after the first of January 194.

Septimius Severus - Silver Drachm -194 AD- Caesarea, Cappadocia / Victory walks left on globe
AV lambda CE pi - CEOVHPOC / MHTPO - KECAPIAC - E - R
19mm - 2.6g.

This week's Featured Coin is one of the first issues for Septimius at Caesarea. It has several variations from the normal styles but nothing that seems outside the realm of reason. "The book" on Caesarea is Edward Sydenham's The Coinage of Caesarea in Cappodocia. For year two there are seven listings of three basic types. Of these, two are Victory reverses but neither matches this coin exactly. In common with the Featured Coin, Sydenham 393 shows the Latin letter 'R' used for 'B' as the date numeral. The exchange of these two letters is rather common on the Eastern denarii of Septimius Severus and, considering that the Greek alphabet made no use of the letter form 'R', is not hard to understand the confusion. The frequency of this 'error' is high enough that it should be considered a matter of style rather than as 'error'. The regular exchange of these two letters goes against the suggestion that the 'R' is a version of 'A' (numeral '1'). On this coin the letter 'A' is uncrossed and exactly like the lamba. The usual form of 'A' (see examples at bottom of this page) is crossed and straight sided not at all resembling an 'R'. I would love to think I found a year one coin but, certainly, I did not. None of the listed drachms spell out the name of the city so completely as on this coin but the form is listed on larger coins of this city. More disturbing to me is the unclear begining of the city name. The 'K' is very low and near the head of Victory. In the space where 'AI' is expected is the bottom of what appears to be an 'E'. I would love to see a coin from this die with a clear strike in this region. Lastly, the abbreviation for "year" is regularly 'ET' but here is shortened to 'E'.

The above paragraph should have driven off 90% of the people who started this page. Why, then, did I post it? The study of Numismatics is one of minutia. Specialists zoom in on a small area of coinage and study every detail of every specimen to discover every minor bit of knowledge. After enough little bits of information are assembled, sometimes, a pattern can be recognised and the overview of the coinage appears. In this manner new mints are discovered or the internal structure of the mint can be deduced. Such little things also speak loudly in the recognition of modern fakes. Variation from the norm is 'normal' but that variation frequently followed a pattern or an idiom. Experience with this idiom protects from some (far from all) creations of modern diecutters.

Certainly there is nothing wrong with collecting ancient coins in an overview manner. Thousands of collectors set a goal of one coin per Emperor and want no more. Others of us pick a speciality and nitpick it to death. Both approaches can be enjoyable. In fact I collect both generally and within a speciality (or six specialities). Caesarea is not my speciality so I do not know the answers to questions posed by this coin. If it is your area of expertise, I would love to hear from you.

Victory walks left on globe
(AV) lambda CE pi - CEOVHPOC
MHTP(O pi )O - KAICAPI - ET - R
Sydenham 393
Mt. Argaeus (now Mt. Erciyes)
(AV) lambda CE pi - CEOVHPOC
MHTPO pi - KAICAPI - ETB
Sydenham 389
The above coins are slightly more normal drachms of Caesarea year two. Condition on the material available is not always perfect so some assumptions need to be made to prevent listing a variation based on poor condition rather than die variety.


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(c) 1997 Doug Smith