Denarius - Hadrian P M TR P COS III, Roma

Hadrian's early coinage is inseparable from his effort to stabilize an empire his predecessor Trajan had stretched dangerously thin. Upon accession in 117 AD, he immediately abandoned Trajan's Mesopotamian conquests — a decision so unpopular in Rome that he reportedly had four senior senators executed to suppress opposition. The COS III titulature places this issue in the window when Hadrian was already deep into his first great tour of the provinces, personally inspecting legions and infrastructure from Britain to the Near East.

RIC II.3 #599A is catalogued under the revised second edition of Roman Imperial Coinage, which substantially reorganized Hadrianic issues that earlier scholarship had misattributed or left sequentially ambiguous.