Æ21 - Valerian and Gallienus ΕΠΙ ΑΥΡ ΕΡΜΟΓΕΝΟΥ ΤΗΙΩΝ

Teos, the Ionian coastal city best known in antiquity as the birthplace of the poet Anacreon, retained the right to strike civic bronze under Roman rule well into the third century. The magistrate name preserved in the legend — Aurelius Hermogenes — reflects the spread of the Aurelian nomen following the Constitutio Antoniniana of 212 AD, which extended Roman citizenship across the empire and flooded provincial onomastics with newly minted Roman names. The joint reign of Valerian and Gallienus, during which this piece was struck, was one of the most pressured periods in Roman imperial history, with simultaneous frontier crises on the Rhine and Euphrates straining the central administration.

Teos itself was a minor issuer within the Smyrna conventus, and the series attributed to Hermogenes is small.