Æ27 - Caracalla ΤΙΑΝΩΝ

Tium was a small coastal polis on the Black Sea shore of Bithynia, overshadowed by its larger neighbors Amastris and Heraclea Pontica, and its civic bronze issues under Caracalla are correspondingly scarce. The ethnic ΤΙΑΝΩΝ — the genitive plural identifying the citizens of Tium — appears on these provincials as an assertion of local identity at a moment when Caracalla's 212 AD Constitutio Antoniniana had just extended Roman citizenship to virtually every free inhabitant of the empire, collapsing the legal distinction between Roman and provincial.