Semis Anonymous

By the mid-second century BC, the Roman bronze coinage was in structural decline. The semis had already undergone decades of weight reduction — the full libral standard of roughly 164 grams was a distant memory — and the pieces struck in this decade reflect a system that Rome was gradually abandoning in favor of silver as the primary transactional medium. Anonymous bronzes of this period are notoriously difficult to attribute without die study, as no magistrate claimed responsibility for the issue.

RRC 272/1 falls within Crawford's grouping of struck bronzes preceding the near-cessation of official Roman bronze coinage around 91 BC.