This is a Roman Provincial coin, that's clear. I bought it because I'm curious about the reverse - what is it we see here? Five horses jumping, with a wheel left and right? The Dioscuri reining in their horses? And does this emperor have a beard, or doesn't he? 26 mm, 11.18 gr.
I see some Greek in exergue. Can you make any of it out? I see a “LITON” which could be just about anything honestly
The pose of your horses now seems to be somewhat similar to a front-facing quadriga like those if Probus (not my coin)
A wheel, that's what I thought, and one to the right also (it's less clear). The front-facing quadriga (what a beauty!) doesn't show wheels... On the reverse, 10h, it says OΠO, for what it's worth. And now I think I see a lozenge-form countermark on the neck of the emperor.
Well for -OPO- NIKOPOLITON comes to mind. Then again, so does MARKIANOPOLIS... I feel like I’ve reached the end of my usefulness here
These are challenging indeed. When I first saw the picture I thought about the Dioskouroi but this is not a logical assumption. I think the emperor is bearded (again, no proof on that) and anyway this doesn't clarify anything. I also have a coin bought .... last yeat (happy new year everybody!) that won this title - my worst coin of 2020. I have no clue, I asked for help but as expected there as no attribution. Only clear things - bearded emperor, NO possible NOC at 10-11 a clock on the obverse and what you can see on the reverse. In my ID files I left it as "provincial, possibly Antonius Pius or Marcus Aurelius or Commodus". Not something I'm happy with but it adds to the mistery of this hobby
I popped "AE *opolis wheel" into acsearch.com and found this from Hadrianopolis: https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=7548781 The obverse is different, but could that be the reverse?
I found a couple more examples, all with descriptions in German. Here's what Google translate had to say about the reverse of the above coin: "Naked, bearded Heracles standing in a lunge to the left, his head turned back, with the club in his right hand to strike and at the same time with his left hand he grabbed Diomedes, who had fallen on his knees in front of him, by the hair; in the background on the left a carriage indicated by wheels and a horse jumping to the left, on the right three horses with bridles rearing, jumping or falling to the right."
That coin without doubt depicted a (then) famous sculpture, like they often do. The Hadrianopolis coin has the wheel, but in my coin the figures all have the same height and form. I also thought about this coin of Codrula, Pamphylia, with the Dioscuri, their horses and a goddess. Using RPC online as a search machine didn't help with 'Five horses' or 'six horses'. But it might help with ambr0zie's coin: the goddess on the reverse is sitting on a curule chair, isn't it?
I think it is a curule chair, yes. I was told by several collectors that Cybele is on the reverse. Used acsearch, RPC, but I simply can't find anything similar. The coin was in a batch of 13 worn coins (all RIC but this one is most certainly provincial) - I was able to identify the rest of 12 without doubts although some of them were in worse shape than this one.
