Æ36 - Gordian III ϹΑΜΙΩΝ

Samos sat within the conventus of Miletus during the Severan and post-Severan periods, meaning civic bronze issues required implicit approval from the Roman proconsul of Asia rather than from any local senate acting alone. Under Gordian III, provincial bronze production across Asia Minor surged — partly because the emperor's campaigns against Shapur I demanded enormous quantities of precious metal for the military chest, leaving civic bronzes to absorb local transactional demand. Samos was a relatively minor issuing authority by this point, which makes the survival of catalogued die matches like VII.1#574.1 useful for reconstructing the sequence of the city's final civic emissions before the genre collapsed under Gallienus.