AR22 - Marcus Aurelius L Ι

Year 10 of Marcus Aurelius's reign in Egypt — 169/170 AD — fell during the early stages of the Antonine Plague, the pandemic that had swept back from the eastern campaigns of Lucius Verus and was then moving through the empire at devastating speed. Alexandria itself was not spared. The Alexandrian mint continued striking throughout, and billon tetradrachms from this period circulated in a city where mortality was high enough to disrupt trade and tax collection simultaneously.

The billon content of Alexandrian issues had been declining incrementally since Nero's debasement of the late 60s AD, a slide that never fully reversed.