15 years ago: the resurrection of an Emperor.

This story is so amazing that it deserve to be told—or at least repeat. (Apologies for my poor vocabulary, english is not my mother tongue)

The French coin
November 28th 1900.
It all started almost 120 years ago in France. Félix Chaillou, a farmer and winegrower—but also a part time archeologist, was excavating on his own property at Les Cléons, near the city of Nantes. He was searching for about 20 years and had already discovered prehistoric artifacts, also Gallic and Roman objects. But in the autumn of 1900, while he was working on his land, he accidentially unearthed a terracota vase containing more than 1400 little bronze coins of the Tyrans era. In the hoard he identified coins of Gordiano III, Postumus, Tetricus, Victorinus, Gallienus, Claudius the Gothicus and Aurelianus.


But in the middle of the lot he noticed a little bronze with this legend: IMP DOMITIANUS PF AVG....Who was this unknown bearded man with the title of IMPERATOR ? And when did he live ? No historians had wrote about a DOMITIANUS who became emperor in the chaos of the third century AD. Nobody but...there were 2 sources mentioning this name. In The New Histories by the Greek Zosimus, the author wrote about the reign of Aurelian and report that 3 men were punished for the crime of treason. The names of the perpetrators of the revolt were Epitimus, Urbanus and DOMITIANUS...


In the (unreliable ?) Historia Augustae, a DOMITIANUS is presented as a general of Aureolus involved in the suppression of the revolt of Macrianus in 261 AD.



One year after de discovery, an article was published about the mysterious coin in the Revue Numismatique of 1901, but only illustrated with a simple line drawing of the antoniniani.



Thirty years later, a photography of a plaster casr of the coin was shown in the same publication.



It was enough for P.H.Webb to add it in the RIC volume 2 in 1933. Meanwhile, the famous DOMITIANUS amazingly disappeared from the museum of Nantes. During the next decades, the authenticity of the coin was debated by many specialist. Those who concluded that it was probably a fake made many hypothesis :

• It was an altered or tooled genuine coin of this period, probably of Tetricus
• It is an authentic coin but struck from modified dies of Victorinus
• It was simply a modern conterfeit of a made up emperor

G.Elmer didn’t include it in his reference book in 1942 and L.Laffranchi condemned the coin the same year. Even in 1992, L.Okamura published a paper concluding that the DOMITIANUS was possibly a fake. But surprise! In 2003 the French coin was rediscovered in the Nantes collection. While specialist were examining the only specimen that no eyes on earth has ever seen, an extraordinary discovery was made 350 miles north in England.

The British coin.
April 4th 2003.
David Malin, a young Englishman and amateur metal detectorist, with the help of his sister Carol, unearthed in Chalgrove Oxfordshire a pot full of Roman coins. Buried about 18 inches below the surface it was his second big discovery, after finding a similar size hoard in 1989. The 2 treasures were excavated only 100 feet from each other. In this lot was identified a second copy of the DOMITIANUS, fused with 5000 other coins. Comparaison between the French and the British specimen shows that they were struck from the same pair of dies !


The Chalgrove hoard :



The coin was qualified of « one of the most interesting Roman objects ever found in Britain. » Finally there were no doubts at all .Even if nobody knows his full name, DOMITIANUS did exist and he was an emperor ( or at least an usurper emperor) !
IMP C DOMITIANUS PF AVG
CONCORDIA MILITUM
Concordia standing left, holding patera & cornucopiae
2.07 g


It appears that he grabbed power between the death of Victorinus and the accession of Tetricus in 271 AD. It also seems that he ruled for a very short time, maybe only few days. So the reason of his death ( attempting a ´coup d’état’ and minting his own coinage ) is also the reason why he access immortality in history....So that’s the story, and like somebody once said, it could have been the plot of a bestseller. But a big question remains: what else as yet to be found ???

Bibliography.
S.Estiot. L’usurpateur Domitianus
P.H.Webb. RIC vol.2 p.578, 590 ( 1933)
H.Carnoy. Dict.biographique
A.de la Fuye. Revue num.1901
A.Benenson. Archeology archive 2005

edited for spelling by request

 

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Very interesting..Nice post..

 

Nice writeup! That's one Gallic usurper I will not be collecting any time soon...

 

Very interesting and well-written write-up.

 

Amazing!

 

Great story , thank you for sharing!

 

So he's the Gallic Empire's Domitianus - not the usurper in Egypt.

 

Great post, thanks.

 

Now I'm dreaming of finding a terracota full of coins in my garden............

Q

 

That's a nice little gem of a story, thanks!

 

Nice writeup thanks.

 

I appreciate the nice comments. Erratum: Mr.Doug Smith just made me notice that the usurper in 261 was Macrianus and not Macrinus. My translation from latin to french to english need some improvement.
Mea culpa...

 

Great story. Thanks for sharing.

 

I know Supporters have a longer window of time that allows editing errors but how long do regular members have? Can a moderator make such an edit for someone who timed out.

 

I would love to go and do some detecting around Europe at some point.

 

Sorry to bring back this old boring thread, but I discovered by chance the existence of a third specimen ! In 2006, with the help of the Ministry of the Interior, the fund of the National History Museum of Sofia received an extremely rare Roman copper coin from the second half of the third century. It was found by treasure hunters with the help of metal detectors in one of the numerous Roman sites in Northwestern Bulgaria (it is quite possible, for example, that it originated from the ancient city of Raciaria, whose ruins are currently under constant and unpunished excavation and looting by various "treasure hunter teams”).

Description:

• Obverse: DOMITIAN...... AVG. Bust of Domitian, wearing beard and moustaches, right

• Reverse: LAET...... AVG. Laetitia standing left, holding wreath in right hand, unclear object in left hand. Alter with fire below, left.

Copper. Half worn and slightly corroded example. Diameter 16–18 mm; weight 1.53 g


The museum just sent me the article from their annual reports, published in 2010. You can see the picture inside. Unfortunately the picture is b&w and with low resolution. They will try to find from their numismatic colleagues a better one. I'm looking forward to see it, because it will be easier to determine if we are in the presence of a new type for this "Emperor".

 

A Bulgarian find seems suspicious to me. Bulgaria is currently a den of forgery, and it isn't anywhere near the erstwhile boundaries of the Gallic Empire. That's not to say the coin couldn't have traveled, but it would have been a bit more reassuring if it had been found in France or the UK. The picture doesn"t help the matter.