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1 Denarius - Imitating Antoninus Pius, 138-161
| Issuer | Uncertain Germanic tribes |
|---|---|
| Year | 175-275 |
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| Currency | Aureus (circa 150-325) |
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| Obverse description | Crude barbarous imitation of an imperial Roman denarius, depicting a laureate male bust facing right, rendered in a simplified, provincial style characteristic of Germanic imitative coinage. The portrait shows a bare-necked effigy with loosely modeled facial features and schematic hair. A debased and garbled legend surrounds the bust, derived from the original Antoninus Pius imperial titulature but rendered as meaningless pseudo-Latin letterforms by an engraver unfamiliar with the Latin alphabet. |
|---|---|
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| Reverse lettering | AAL - OA[...] |
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| Additional information |
Barbarous silver imitations of Antoninus Pius denarii were struck well after his death, suggesting the prototypes circulated in Germania long enough to become the template for local coinage rather than any contemporary issue. The tribes producing these had no mint infrastructure in the Roman sense — dies were cut by hand, often by a single craftsman working from a worn prototype, which explains the progressive degradation seen across die sequences.
At 2.04g, this piece sits near the upper end of the weight range for Germanic imitations, where Roman silver had already been debased under the Severans.