I have been taking today off to hang out with my kids and work on some of my newer Roman coins. I found this neat example of Salonina among them. Unless I'm missing something this coins is not listed in Sear or RIC. the closest I could find was RIC-63 (under joint reign with Valerian), but this is CONCORDIA AVG not CONCORDIA AVGG. I did find it in Cohen (Cohen-28). So yeah. Anyway, the thing that prompted me to post it was the obverse inscription: GORN SALONINA AVG (it should read CORN SALONINA AVG). And that my friends is why you spring for a literate engraver!
Obviously the letters C and G are similar by themselves. Confusion is likely to occur. Maybe there is no error.
Heh, that's a neat find. We can see the opposite case in my coin below, where the die-worker seems to have picked up and used a "C" letter punch in place of a "G" to produce the legend AVC CERM instead of AVG GERM.
Well, G and C were pretty interchangeable in early Latin- see Gaius/Caius etc.- so maybe it's just a pronunciation variant. Or maybe the celator is insinuating that the empress is actually a Gorn:
Or, maybe, CORN PEOPLE... RI Augustus 27BC-AD14 Æ20 5.5g 12h Apameia Phrygia Magistrate Attalos c 15BC Two corn-ears above maeander pattern RPC I, 3125 SCARCE
I had forgotten that the creature on Star Trek was a Gorn, he was probably made at Kirk because the Romans used his name on this coin without permission. You go Gorn!
I would think that is the most reasonable and likely explanation. And no, NOT the part about the Gorn.
Bear in mind that at the rate at which antoniniani were being struck at that time (some estimate up to a million a day at a major mint like Rome) dies were "burnt up" at a furious rate. I suspect that if, in the process of addition of lettering to a nearly complete die, an apprentice engraver sneezed or just straight-up slipped with the burin and made a small inappropriate scratch, there was no way they were going to scrap that die and start over. Also, when you're talking about the House of Valerian, you must understand that it wasn't until relatively recently that anyone made a really serious effort to wade through the astoundingly enormous body of surviving coins and make - if it's even possible - a truly exhaustive survey of types. RIC V, i, in particular is an example of how even the finest minds in numismatics at that time (late 1950's, early '60's) were overwhelmed in their attempt to produce a catalog of all the varieties the frantic action at the mints produced in the 250's-260's. "Not in RIC" really doesn't mean a great deal when you get into this body of material. To be able to say, for example, "Not in Göble" carries a much greater impact - but even that is not all that unusual and specialists are adding "newly discovered" variants all the time.
