Follis - Arcadius VIRTVS EXERCITI, Antioch

Arcadius inherited the East in 395 following Theodosius I's death, but the VIRTVS EXERCITI type was issued against a backdrop of acute military anxiety rather than confidence — Alaric's Visigoths had been raiding the Balkans almost continuously since 391, and the eastern field army's reliability was genuinely in question. Striking a virtue-of-the-army type under those conditions reads less as celebration than as exhortation.

The Antioch mint used the officina letters ANT with Greek numerals to distinguish workshop output during this period, a detail worth checking against the reverse exergue on any example attributed to RIC X 71.