Nummus - Valentinianus II REPARATIO REIPVB, Rome

The REPARATIO REIPVB ("restoration of the republic") coinage was issued under Valentinian II when he was still a child emperor, elevated at age four following his father Valentinian I's sudden death from a burst blood vessel during a diplomatic rage in 375. Real power lay with his half-brother Gratian and, after Adrianople in 378, increasingly with Theodosius in the East. The slogan itself was already a generation old by this issue — recycled imperial rhetoric that had lost whatever specific political meaning it once carried.