Faustina the Elder died in 140 or 141 AD, and Antoninus Pius responded by securing her deification — a move that generated an enormous provincial coinage across Asia Minor in her honor. Sardis, as the principal city of its conventus and a site of deep Lydian civic pride, was among the more prolific issuers. This diassarion belongs to that posthumous or near-posthumous burst of activity, struck while the city was simultaneously navigating its relationship with the new Antonine dynasty.
BMC RE #140 places this within a well-documented Sardian sequence, though the conventus issues of this reign remain less systematically studied than the Ephesian material.
Faustina the Elder died in 140 or 141 AD, and Antoninus Pius responded by securing her deification — a move that generated an enormous provincial coinage across Asia Minor in her honor. Sardis, as the principal city of its conventus and a site of deep Lydian civic pride, was among the more prolific issuers. This diassarion belongs to that posthumous or near-posthumous burst of activity, struck while the city was simultaneously navigating its relationship with the new Antonine dynasty.
BMC RE #140 places this within a well-documented Sardian sequence, though the conventus issues of this reign remain less systematically studied than the Ephesian material.