Æ18 - Commodus ΟΜΗΡΟϹ ΝΙΚΑΙΕΩΝ

Nicaea's civic bronze coinage under Commodus drew heavily on the city's claim to Homer — a disputed honor shared aggressively with Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, and several others throughout antiquity. Nicaea's insistence on the poet as a civic symbol was partly a prestige competition among Bithynian and Ionian cities, each minting his image to assert cultural primacy in the Greek-speaking East.

The reference IV.1#6246 places this within the Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum corpus for Bithynia.