A friend has asked me to help identify this coin but I don't recognize the 'personage' or the legend. Does anyone have any ideas, please? (I can't make 'AVG' out of the legend and 'IVG' or 'IVC' doesn't make sense to me.)
At first glance I though it was LIBERTAS AVG but I don't think that's it. Could be a contemporary imitation from the looks of the reverse.
Bingo. I was initially thinking it was provincial, but with the obverse shown, there's no doubt this is a contemporary imitation of a Claudius II antoninianus. I'd suggest FIDES AVG for the reverse, but of course with corrupted legends and type. http://cngcoins.com/Coin.aspx?CoinID=275051
A 1750 year old 'fake', or legally made coin for trade purposes that didn't originate from a recognized mint? Are they collectable?
Illegal, but more or less tolerated, depending on the kind of counterfeit, time period, and location. See: Boon, "Counterfeit Coins in Roman Britain," in Coins and the Archaeologist. (Great article and great publication. I strongly recommend it.) They're somewhat collectable, about as much as the official issues of Claudius II. Unfortunately, there's just so much we don't know about these yet that its hard to narrow them down to any particular area. We can be reasonably sure, however, that the majority of these appear to originate from Northwest Gaul, within the boundaries of the empire. Some great work has been with later imitations of the Constantininian Urbs Roma issues that does, however, manage to isolate the mints for a small, close-knit series down to the region of East Anglia.
That's pretty rough just because the coins are 99.9% cheap and unpopular with investors. Are there any investment grade Claudius ants? There are some nice golds. Certainly you will not get rich on Claudius II and as long as the majority of people who own ancient coins are more interested in their cash appreciation potential there might be a chance for someone out there to make a real contribution to numismatic science studying them. I'm not sure that there is a real opportunity in the study of barbarous copies of this period. I may be short sighted but fail to see how we can ever prove anything organizing the unofficial coins. They have such a range from what probably fools experts into believing they are official to those identifiable by the blind. We usually see barbarous coins listed as copying a specific ruler or type but there are some that are hard to accept as even copying something we have seen before. They are fun but I wouldn't pin my hopes of a doctoral candidacy on figuring them out. Who does this copy? A point: Not all copies of Roman coins were used in places where the emperors defined legality. Saying they were tolerated implies a level of control far beyond what I suspect existed in much of the regions surrounding the limits of the Empire.
