Antoninianus - Diocletianus LAETITIA FVND; Laetitia

Diocletian struck these issues during the early years of his reign, before the monetary reforms of 294 AD fundamentally restructured Roman coinage. The antoninianus by this point had degraded so far from its third-century silver content that even these nominally "silver" pieces carry only a thin surface wash over a largely base-metal core — the product of decades of fiscal crisis and military expenditure that successive emperors had never managed to arrest. Diocletian's solution, when it finally came, was the argenteus and the follis, effectively killing the antoninianus as a denomination entirely.