1/2 Siliqua In the name of Arcadius

The period 401–410 covers the catastrophic unraveling of Roman authority in the West: Alaric's two sieges of Rome, the sack of 410, and the wholesale breakdown of frontier control along the Rhine and Danube. Germanic groups operating inside or just beyond former imperial territory routinely struck coin in Roman imperial names — Arcadius being the living eastern emperor and therefore nominally legitimate — without any sanction from Constantinople. These are not forgeries in any meaningful sense; they are political statements in silver, asserting familiarity with Roman monetary forms while the infrastructure that produced the originals was collapsing.

The "uncertain Germanic tribes" attribution reflects genuine scholarly disagreement. The cf. qualification against RIC IX 35.3 signals a close but imperfect match to the Roman prototype.