Æ25 - Caracalla ΝΙΚΑΙΕΩΝ

Nicaea's municipal bronze coinage under Caracalla was produced by civic authority, not imperial mandate — the city paid for the dies, organized the strikes, and circulated the coins locally within Bithynia. The legend ΝΙΚΑΙΕΩΝ asserts civic identity in the Greek east at a moment when Caracalla was aggressively centralizing power in Rome, culminating in the Constitutio Antoniniana of 212 AD, which extended Roman citizenship across the empire — a reform that may have quietly undermined the cultural distinctiveness these provincial civic issues were designed to project.