Dupondius or As - Hadrian HISPANIA S C, Hispania

This coin belongs to Hadrian's remarkable series of "province" types, struck in Rome to commemorate his unprecedented empire-wide tours of the 120s and early 130s. No emperor before him had traveled so extensively through the provinces, and the series — covering roughly a dozen territories — was almost certainly a deliberate propaganda exercise, advertising personal inspections of the frontiers and local populations. Hispania was among the most symbolically loaded choices: it was Hadrian's own ancestral province, his family having settled there generations before his birth in Italica.