Æ29 - Marcus Aurelius ΕΠΙ ϹΤΡ ΚΛ ΠΡΟΚΛΟΥ ϹΟΦΙ (ΤΟΥ) ϹΜ (Ρ)

Proclos the Sophist served as strategos of Smyrna during the early co-reign of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, and the civic pride embedded in his title — sophist, not merely magistrate — reflects Smyrna's fierce rivalry with Ephesus and Pergamon for the honorific title of "First City of Asia." That competition played out partly through the quality and ambition of local bronze coinage, where naming a celebrated intellectual as issuing authority was itself a political statement.

The abbreviation ϹΜ(Ρ) in the legend encodes Smyrna's own boastful epithet, a detail the city's mint repeated obsessively across civic issues of this period.