Æ25 - Elagabalus ΕΠΙ ϹΤΡ ΑΙΛ ΑΠΟΛΩΝΙΟΥ (sic) ϹΜΥΡΝ

Smyrna was among the most aggressive cities in the Greek East when it came to courting imperial favor, and Elagabalus — whatever Rome thought of him — was a useful vehicle for that competition. The magistrate name in the legend, rendered here with the non-standard spelling ΑΠΟΛΩΝΙΟΥ rather than the expected ΑΠΟΛΛΩΝΙΟΥ, is not a die-cutter's casual error but reflects a genuine epichoric variation documented across a handful of Smyrnaean bronzes from this reign. Single-lambda spellings of the name appear inconsistently across the city's civic coinage, suggesting more than one workshop operating without strict orthographic oversight.