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Message:: [QUOTE="Gavin Richardson, post: 2665926, member: 83956"][ATTACH=full]592424[/ATTACH] Here's my Fausta and a little write-up I did. (On Thursdays on Facebook I will occasionally have a "Throwback Thursday" in which I will throw it way back. Like, 4th-century back.) Please correct or augment my narrative: This is one of my most favorite coins, and the saddest. Struck ca. 325 A.D., its obverse features Fausta, the second wife of Constantine the Great. On the reverse we see Fausta assuming the personification of “Spes,” or “Hope.” The legend reads SPES REIPVBLICAE, “The Hope of the Republic.” The two children at her breast are her infant sons Constantine II and Constantius II–a bit anachronistic since Constantine II was 8 years old at the time. But this mother’s message is clear: Constantine has male heirs, and they will be the Roman hope of the future. Sadly, this hope would be marred by the boys’ general massacre of family rivals after the death of Constantine the Great in 337. Then in 340 Constantine II was killed in ambush laid by the forces of another brother struggling for power (those of Constans). The career of the warrior emperor Constantius II lasted longer until his death from illness in 361. As for Fausta? Her end was the saddest of all. The sources are murky; some assert that she and her stepson Crispus plotted treason together and even had an affair. Others say Crispus made advances to Fausta and was denounced by her and then executed, but Constantine came to regret the execution, fearing he had been misled. What we do know is that, about a year after this coin was struck, Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor, had his eldest son and his wife killed. Crispus was poisoned. Fausta was suffocated in an overheated sauna. So much for the “spes reipublicae.”[/QUOTE]

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