Denarius - Hadrian COS III, Virtus

Hadrian's third consulship, held from 119 AD onward as a permanent honorific, provided the dating anchor for a vast coinage program that coincided with his extensive provincial tours. The Virtus type fits within a broader pattern of personification reverses Hadrian deployed deliberately — less to celebrate military victory, which he generally avoided, than to project ideological stability after Trajan's aggressive expansionism had strained the empire's eastern frontier.

RIC II.3 860 is part of the revised Spink corpus that substantially reorganized and renumbered Hadrian's denarii from the older RIC II, making older auction references unreliable without cross-checking OCRE.