Denarius IMP CAES TRAIAN AVG GER DAC P P REST C MAMIL LIME TAN, Mercury, Odysseus, and Argos

This is a "restitution" issue — Trajan's deliberate revival of Republican-era coin types, struck to invoke Rome's ancestral coinage rather than contemporary designs. The series referenced older moneyers' work, in this case the Mamilia gens, whose original issues dated to the late Republic. Trajan's motivations were partly antiquarian, partly propagandistic: presenting himself as a restorer of Roman tradition at a moment when his Dacian campaigns were remaking the empire's eastern geography.

The Mamilia moneyer connection places the prototype somewhere in the first century BC, likely associated with C. Mamilius Limetanus, whose original denarius is dated to around 82 BC.