2 Denarii - Sauromates II

Sauromates II ruled the Bosporan Kingdom as a client king under Roman suzerainty, and his coinage reflects that arrangement directly — the denomination itself, denominated in denarii, is a deliberate adoption of Roman monetary vocabulary by a nominally independent Thracian dynasty on the northern Black Sea littoral. The kingdom's copper issues of this period were not Roman coins but local fiduciary currency, their value anchored to Roman equivalents by royal decree rather than metal content.

The reign of Sauromates II coincided almost exactly with that of Commodus in Rome, a period of increasing instability at the imperial center that the Bosporan court navigated carefully through continued diplomatic alignment.