Æ21 - Marcus Aurelius C L I COR

Corinth's provincial bronze issues under Marcus Aurelius occupy an awkward historiographical position — the city had been refounded as a Roman colony by Julius Caesar in 44 BC, effectively erasing the Greek polis and replacing it with Latin-speaking settlers. By the Antonine period, two centuries on, the colony had drifted back toward Greek cultural identity, and the coinage reflects this tension in its bilingual civic titulature. The abbreviation C L I COR — Colonia Laus Iulia Corinthiensis — preserves Caesar's honorific in every coin struck, long after anyone in the city could have explained why.