AR25 - Hadrian L Δ

Year four of Hadrian's reign — rendered as L Δ in the Alexandrian dating system — falls squarely in the period following his abandonment of Trajan's eastern conquests. Hadrian withdrew from Mesopotamia and Armenia shortly after his accession, a strategic retrenchment that generated real hostility in Rome but stabilized the eastern provinces. Egypt, the most tightly administered province in the empire, continued producing its own closed currency system: Alexandrian tetradrachms were technically billon, though early Hadrianic issues retain enough silver content to be catalogued as AR by some dealers.