Æ23 - Valerian and Gallienus ΠΡΙΗΝΕΩΝ

Priene had been in slow economic decline since the Hellenistic period, its harbor silted beyond recovery by the Maeander delta long before this coin was struck. That the city still produced civic bronze under the joint reign of Valerian and Gallienus — an administratively fractious co-emperorship split between the Rhine frontier and the Persian wars — speaks to how tenaciously small Ionian cities clung to the privilege of local coinage even as the imperial mint system increasingly crowded them out.