Denarius - Domitian IMP XXII COS XVI CENS P P P, Minerva

Domitian's obsessive titulature — IMP XXII, his twenty-second imperatorial acclamation — dates this piece precisely to 92 AD, the year he conducted a brutal Danubian campaign against the Sarmatians and Suebi. The imperatorial count itself was politically loaded: Domitian accumulated these acclamations aggressively, using frontier warfare to shore up legitimacy against a Senate he increasingly treated with open contempt.

By COS XVI he had long since abandoned the pretense of republican collegiality that the consulship implied. RIC II.1 #738 falls within the tightly sequenced late Domitianic issues, where die production was systematic enough that the series is now one of the better-documented of the Flavian coinage.