Denarius - Titus TR P IX IMP XV COS VIII P P

Titus held the tribunician power for the ninth time and his fifteenth imperatorial acclamation during 80 AD — the year Vesuvius had already buried Pompeii and Herculaneum, and the year the Colosseum was finally inaugurated after a decade of construction. The coin's dating formula pins it to one of the most event-saturated years of any short reign in imperial history. Titus would be dead within a year, and the circumstances — sudden illness, or possibly his brother Domitian — were never fully resolved.