Denarius - Hadrian P M TR P COS III LIB PVB, Libertas

Hadrian's "Libertas Publica" coinage of 120–121 AD belongs to a broader programmatic issue celebrating constitutional virtues — a deliberate contrast to Trajan's martial emphasis. Hadrian had just returned from consolidating the Rhine and Danube frontiers, formally abandoning Trajan's Mesopotamian conquests, a strategic retreat his contemporaries found deeply controversial. The Libertas types were part of a coordinated propaganda effort to reframe retrenchment as principled governance rather than weakness.

RIC II.3 #363 reflects the revised Mattingly–Sydenham numbering from the 2019 second edition, which substantially reorganized Hadrianic issues previously scattered across the old RIC II.