Stater - Rhoemetalces Antoninus

Rhoemetalces ruled the Bosporan Kingdom as a client monarch under Roman oversight, and the pairing of his name with Antoninus Pius on this stater reflects the dependency precisely — the king's authority was legitimate only insofar as Rome endorsed it. The Bosporan gold stater series is unusual in that it persisted as a functioning gold coinage long after most of the Greek east had transitioned to Roman imperial denominations, sustained largely by the kingdom's role as Rome's grain-supply conduit from the northern Black Sea littoral.

By the mid-second century the stater's gold purity had already begun its slow, documented decline from the Augustan-era standard.