| Obverse description |
Bare or lightly wreathed male head in left profile, rendered in a bold, archaic Central Italic style characteristic of the Aes Grave coinage tradition. The facial features are modelled in high relief with broad, stylized contours, exhibiting a robust plasticity typical of third-century BC Italian bronze casting. The hair is rendered in layered, wavy locks swept back from the brow, with what appears to be a cluster of berries or pellets at the crown, possibly indicative of a Dionysiac or Bacchic attribute. The flan is broad, thick, and irregular, consistent with the cast production method of this series. No legend or inscription is present in the field. |
| Reverse description |
A large quadruped animal, most plausibly a bull or ox, depicted in left profile in a heavily worn and partially legible composition. The figure is rendered in low to moderate relief, with the body mass occupying the central field of the broad, irregularly shaped cast flan. The limbs and musculature are summarily indicated, consistent with the provincial Italic Aes Grave casting style of the third century BC. A vertical linear element, possibly a standard or staff, appears to the left of the animal. No inscription or value mark is clearly discernible in the surviving surface. |
Aes grave — cast rather than struck — was the dominant form of Roman and central Italian bronze coinage through much of the third century BC, and a piece of this weight sits at the extreme upper end of what survives. The tressis, worth three asses, was never a common denomination; most transactional weight fell on the as and its simpler fractions. Attribution to an uncertain central Italian city rather than Rome reflects the decentralized monetary reality of the period, when allied and semi-independent communities operated their own cast bronze series with only loose coordination.
Haeberlin's 1910 corpus remains the foundational reference for aes grave, and his page 280 attribution places this firmly outside the main Roman sequence.