Æ27 - Claudius ΕΠΙ ΜΙΝΔΙΟΥ ΒΑΛΒΟΥ ΑΝΘΥΠΑΤΟΥ ΜΗΤΡΟΠΟΛΕΩΣ, ΝΚΟ (below)

Minding Balbus served as proconsul of Bithynia-Pontus under Claudius, and this issue records his tenure in the province with unusual precision — the legend names him explicitly, a practice that allows modern scholars to anchor the coin to a specific administrative year. Nicomedia, as the leading city of the province and seat of the Roman governor, held the right to strike civic bronze, and regularly leveraged proconsular name-dropping to assert metropolitan status over rival Nicaea. The letters ΝΚΟ below almost certainly abbreviate the city's ethnic, reinforcing that civic claim directly on the flan.