Victorinus attributing help

Been catching up on attributing some of my coins today and this one seems to show up as being only in bronze and not in silver like mine. It looks like this one in wildwinds:

Victorinus AE Antoninianus. IMP C PIAV VICTORINVS AVG, radiate draped bust right / PAX AVG, Pax standing left holding olive branch and sceptre, V in left field, star in right field. RIC 117; Cohen 83; Sear 11174.


Pic of mine.

 

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Mine matches the Wildwinds listing. You have the shorter obverse legend lacking PIAV. RIC 118
https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=3482236
The metal color is more a matter of cleaning and toning. Some have more silver; some have silver wash added; some have been cleaned to look brighter.

 

Your coin may be struck in a better quality billon, hence you should be happy. There is a small chance it is a forgery - don't see any flow lines on the coin leading out from the lettering to the edge of the coin. I'm not really sure, it may require a more practiced eye to tell.

 

@dougsmit the RIC 118 that you posted a URL to also comes out as bronze and mine is silver, so I am lost on this one.

 

I do see a spot of bronze on the center of pax's chest and the knee. Also looking really close I can find a few flow lines on it.

 

I suppose calling them bronze is a good guess, especially when they look like bronze, but technically they are billon. It's just that some of them contain more silver than others, while still others are silvered, as Doug says. Gallic issues are widely disparate when it comes to alloys and silvering, so you can actually have two coins with the same attribution where one looks like bronze and the other silver.

 

I have one that I attribute to forgery (silver plate).

 

Mine has copper showing through at the chest and knee of pax also the 3 dots directly above the olive wreath and a few dots by the letter A in pax. Is mine a possible sliver plated forgery ?

 

Would these forgeries be contemporary or to intentionally deceive collectors?

 

Probably not. It's more likely an uneven mix of bronze and silver. That's very common in these billon issues, and it reflects the generally low level of care with which these issues were prepared. Times were pretty tough then, and minting authorities were more interested in getting coins available for trade than they were in--unlike, say, the Greeks--creating works of art.

As a rule, fourees were contemporaneous counterfeits meant to fool merchants at the time. Anything made to fool later collectors would be in better condition since, by definition, anything in a collection doesn't circulate and get worn down like the coin shown in Inspector43's photo.

 

Here's one with the same reverse type -- even down to the V and the * in the fields -- but with a different inscription on the obverse.


Victorinus, AD 269-271.
Roman billon antoninianus, 2.11 g, 19.0 mm, 5 h.
Cologne, AD 270-271.
Obv: IMP C VICTORINVS P F AVG, radiate and draped bust, right.
Rev: PAX AVG, Pax standing left, holding olive branch and scepter; V in left field, * in right field.
Refs: RIC 118; Cohen 79; RCV 11175; Hunter 11.

 

This is a completely different thing from what is being discussed on this thread. The coin is a contemporary fake of a silver denarius of Severus Alexander that had a copper core wrapped in a thin skin of relatively good silver. These are termed 'fourree'. In this thread, we have seen coins with very little silver in the mix. Billon is a silver copper mix that barely looks gray when fresh and often tones brownish like copper. Billon coins with so little silver that they could not look at all gray were sometimes washed at the mint to to remind people tat the alloy did include a little silver but inflation had made it necessary to include that silver in a carrier of copper. The coins of Victorinus were not fakes but just the way the genuine mint made coins at that period. The other choices might have been making very tiny coins of better metal (too easy to lose) or making coins with no silver and asking people to trust the government for the difference the way we do today with our copper nickel quarters. The Roman economy was not yet quite ready for an admittedly fiat currency.

Below is another fourree of Severus Alexander with slightly more of the silver skin remaining. From the style, we can tell that the dies were not made in the official mint. These were not made to fool collectors but were spent on the economy of their day along with good coins until someone discovered their hidden secret and got stuck with the trash. Today, some collectors gather these as a sub-hobby because they are 'ancient' coins that unofficially circulated in their day. Most refuse them as counterfeits.


Anyone wanting to see more on fourrees is invited to visit my four pages on the subject.
http://www.forumancientcoins.com/dougsmith/fourree.html
Click on the links at the bottom of that first page to see the more specialized groups.

 

Thanks @dougsmit I appreciate the feedback. I didn't mean to hijack the thread.

 

Here's my VERY bronze looking antoninianus of Victorinus, mine with Virtus reverse:

 

Could the OP coin perhaps been overstruck on a coin of Postumus? The majority of Postumus' coins are at least a dull grey and have the overall appearance of that Victorinus. Doesn't make a lot of economic sense to overstrike rather than melt, re-alloy with more bronze to make 3-5 new coins, but I could see it happening.

My Victorinus doesn't have the slightest pretense of silver; it is jet black

 

The dude was certainly the king of the raggedy flan!


Victorinus, AD 269-271.
Roman billon antoninianus, 2.29 g, 20.1 mm, 6 h.
Cologne, AD 270-271.
Obv: IMP C VICTORINVS P F AVG, radiate and draped bust, right.
Rev: INVICTVS, Sol advancing left, raising right hand and holding whip in left; * in left field.
Refs: RIC 114; Cohen 49; RCV 11170; De Witte 27; Hunter 7.

 

I have a reasonably large collection of Victorinus and the other "Gallic" emperors. The coins come in billion only for Victorinus, but deteriorated quickly into practically complete bronze/copper issues with no discernible silver content. The coin shown at the start of the thread does not look like a regular issue in relatively good billon. In fact, I think the PAX reverse was only produced in bronze/copper.

If genuine, I think the coin was silvered at some later stage for some unknown reason. I have a Quintillus Ant. which has also been covered with a thick layer of silvering with the copper core showing through at the edges. Why this was done is a complete mystery to me. It is certainly not silver wash, which was applied before the coin was struck.

 

Well it is for sure silver more so than any silver wash coins I have seen. I guess I have another coin to toss into the junk jar.

 

I can still return the coin to the dealer I bought it from.

What would you do if it was yours ? I am afraid I will always look at it as not being right and not deserving to be in my collection.