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Research Coins: The Coin Shop

 
555915. Sold For $1250

Titus. AD 79-81. Æ Sestertius (36mm, 26.16 g, 6h). Uncertain Eastern mint (Thrace?). Struck AD 80-81. Laureate head right / Pax standing left, holding branch and cornucopia. RIC II 498; RPC II 501. Dark green patina, light smoothing evident in fields, mineralized encrustation around rim. VF. Broad flan, bold portrait.


Flavian coinage includes an enigmatic series of large bronzes with a distinctive broad, flat fabric that were clearly produced at a mint other than Rome, although they all have normal Latin legends. The present specimen falls into this category. Carradice and Buttrey, in the new edition of RIC II, describes this mint as producing coins with "large portraits with heavy, muscular necks, large reverse figures and lettering that tends to be crowded and heavily seriffed." Various experts have placed this putative mint in Gaul (Lugdunum?), Bithynia, or Thrace. Many of the examples currently in the market seem to derive from the Balkans region, lending weight to a Thracian mint, but a definitive conclusion has yet to be reached.