The past month or so, eBay has had a lot of cheap, cruddy imperial denarii coming up for auction - just my kind of stuff. So I've been scooping up a lot of them if the price is right and then try to figure them out. Call it a hobby. One of my recent finds was an ugly denarius of Antoninus Pius with Fortuna on the reverse. Just another goddess standing around holding stuff (as Doug puts it). According to OCRE there are 28 Fortuna denarii for AP, so I had to start whittling 'em down. Mine is holding a rudder - but also a patera, which I thought odd (and a handful). The reverse inscription is FORTVNA... with the right side missing - and it is the right side that turned out to be interesting: OBSEQVENS According to FORVM: "On another coin of Antoninus Pius, with FORTVNA OBSEQVENS for its epigraph, Fortune places her rudder on the prow of a ship. "This denotes, says Patin, that the goddess had shown herself condescending (obsequentem) in all things to the emperor; the rudder and stern of a galley appear to signify the achievement of great victories, and the happy return of the legions."" https://www.forumancientcoins.com/numiswiki/view.asp?key=FORTVNA OPSEQVENS According to OCRE there are three of these, RIC 257, 271 and 286A, with the tribunician year being the differentiator (mine is hard to see, but I think it is XXII). Doug Smith has this coin (XXI version) written up on his "Questions" page (his is a much nicer example). It seems this one has some attribution issues/errors, according to Doug's research: https://www.forumancientcoins.com/dougsmith/quest.html Here is mine (it is on a small, crowded but chunky flan and weighs 3.37 grams): Antoninus Pius Denarius (158-159 A.D.) Rome Mint ANTONINVS AVG PIVS P P TR P XXII, laureate head right / FORTVNA [OBSEQVENS] COS IIII, Fortuna standing left, holding patera above rudder on prow right, cornucopiae in left. RIC 286A. (3.37 grams / 16 x 14 mm) Here is the reverse from an OCRE example, OBSEQVENS visible: Any others out there? They seem to be a bit scarce, but not rare.
Closest I have is this: Antoninus Pius, August 138 - 7 March 161 A.D. AR Denarius ANTONINVS AVG PIVS P P TR P XIIII, laureate head right; reverse COS IIII, Fortuna standing left holding rudder and cornucopia. RIC III 194, RSC II 265, BMCRE IV 719-20, Scarce , Rome mint 150-151 A.D.
What is OCRE? Old Coins of the Roman Empire? Got it. An ANS site for updating the RIC. http://numismatics.org/ocre/
Yeah, since I don't own a copy of RIC, I use OCRE as an electronic substitute. It is not perfect, but it is quite useful. In the case of the OP, it is not in Wildwinds, so OCRE was my main resource for figuring it out.
That's an interesting coin, indeed,! @Marsyas Mike . You can read more about these coins -- as well as about two temples of Fortuna Obsequeas, one of which is conjectured to have been restored by Antoninus Pius -- in Stevenson's Dictionary of Roman Coins, p. 396. You have to take this antiquarian reference book with a grain of salt, however. Your coin almost certainly reads FORTVNA OPSEQVENS, with a P, not a B,* but the OBSEQVENS variant is described in Cohen. The British Museum has six examples with TR P XXII (or illegible) titulature (BMCRE4 932-937). The one they chose to be the plate coin is 932: *I have to laugh at Stevenson for anachronistically arguing with actual native Latin speakers in antiquity that they spelled OPSEQVENS incorrectly.
The British museum has two coins of this series with the OBSEQVENS spelling, an as ... ... and a sestertius.
Thank you for the additional information on these, RC - my Latin is pretty shaky, so I thought obsequious being spelt the way it is, the Latin would be "OBSEQVENS" - I guess minding your B's and P's has been a problem down through the ages. I wish my coin had the other side of the flan off-center so I could know for sure. Another casualty of the Ravages of Time! I think the FORVM quote I used comes from Stevenson's book - my local library has it on the shelf too (a reprint, alas). When I was originally researching this, I was surprised how little material I could find on this rather peculiar reverse type for Fortuna - when Stevenson is your best source you can figure the Internet is not the best place to find things all the time. I wonder if an old issue of The Celator has anything about it? Doug's page was the most solid modern thing I could find - and as he says, that was 22 years ago (and in the form of a query)!
