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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;John Anthony, post: 1830461, member: 42773&quot;]It&#039;s a thorny business. Ras unravels it pretty well in ERIC so I&#039;ll just quote him...</p><p><br /></p><p>&quot;On the whole, RIC‘s treatment of the pre-reform coinage for Diocletian and Maximian is unsatisfactory. In particular, the mintmarks and busts are often meshed together under single entries without itemizing the known varieties. Since RIC is the primary guide in compiling these sections some compromises were necessary to account for material known to RIC and Cohen but which is insufficiently described in either. Specifically, to avoid runaway entries for minor varieties of dubious existence, the listings were weighted towards the observed busts at the expense of the mintmark arrangements. In many cases any given entry with a question mark in the exergue notes may signify multiple possible markings. The hope is that future editions can fill in some of the blanks through further research.</p><p><br /></p><p>For the collector and student of ancient Roman coins one of the most challenging areas regards the correct attribution of coins which share similar legends but belong to two different emperors. When this happened in earlier years, such as the case with Antoninus Pius and Caracalla or Elagabalus, all one had to do to tell one from the other was a quick look at the portraits. Unfortunately, this method is no longer available following the coinage reform of 294 after which all vestigial traces of individualism were done away with in coin art. It was ironically at this very time that two men would be in a position to afford such confusion with senior emperor Maximian and Diocletian‘s successor Galerius – who is primarily known by that name only in recent times for back then he was also known as Maximian. The western mints made no effort to distinguish who was being honored and, in fact, seem to have relished this confusion for political gain.</p><p><br /></p><p>When both Diocletian and Maximian abdicated in 305 they each received a distinctive new type bearing legends appropriate to their senior status. In Maximian‘s case the old legend formula was left in place for the new Augustus. This is all very tidy for Maximian and Constantius who have no particular fondness of Galerius, him being at times a bitter rival despite superficial relations suggesting otherwise, and they can afford to pay dubious homage through this bit of diplomatic ambiguity. The nuance, of course, will be lost on the average man on the street who no more or less than the modern collector will assume this is none other than Maximian; a clever marketing move with minimal negative consequences. This theory suffers only slightly when it comes to the eastern mints whose gold output, those very much under Galerian control, used an equivocal MAXIMIANVS though paralleled very strictly with the abdication coinage previously mentioned. These same eastern mints spared no such ambiguity for the rank and file base coinage which nearly always received legends prefixing a GAL VAL with the MAXIMIANVS.</p><p><br /></p><p>To cut the confusion this catalog breaks with numismatic canon and avoids the controversial issue of assigning some to Maximian and others to Galerius. The simplistic approach is adopted instead of assigning all coinage with the usual Maximian legends under this section; highlighted however to reflect their special status and guide the collector accordingly. The caveat however remains that even if Maximian, Constantius and Constantine enjoyed the opportunity to effect a sly snub the official policy still fully recognized the eastern emperor. This means that a case can be made, and has historically, that all those post-abdication coins not explicitly taking the latter senior-specific legends should be properly considered as belonging to Galerius.&quot;[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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