Tonight's coin show finds are three AE antoniniani of Gallienus' sole reign. All have something to recommend them and none would be suitable if you were to have only one coin of the ruler. I'll mention what made me like each one. The first is the cheapest of the group and the most unusual in one or two ways that most people would care nothing about. It has flan cracks and reverse roughness which explains it being cheaper than the other two but it is not only from the Siscia mint but the coin bears a mintmark of the city letter. The vast majority of coins of this era with an S in the field will be attributed to the secundus (2nd) workshop using the Latin ordinal system of shop numbering. Here the S left of Victory is Siscia. To the right of Victory is a Greek letter gamma denoting the third shop using the Greek numeral method. Where it gets strange is that the gamma falls between the letters of the encircling legend VICTORIA AET (eternal victory) making it look like the last word was AELT. This is not a spelling error; it is just strange. The second coin gets more of its appeal from condition and partial silvering but it shares a small bit of the strange situation above with the workshop number being a Roman numeral VI (6) also falling in the middle of the AVG ending reverse legend. This is nothing near as odd as the first coin because VI turned on its side does not look like a different letter so it is not confusing. Otherwise this is just a decent and ordinary Rome mint coin. Finally is a coin from the popular animal series but it has serious problems from being double struck. Note the remains of a chin to the right of the portrait as well as a double G - one from each strike. The hippocamp is one of my favorite animals from the series and comes through the doubling with little problem. The legends suffer more but worst is the mintmark N which is an option in RIC but not understood by me. The other options are A, delta and S. While we are talking about N's lets mention the classic example of the Rome mint N of this period just right of the hippocamp nose where the N looks like III (Neptuo Cons Avg). Gallienus' mints worked at a feverish pace to keep up with demand for these low value coins. Errors like this are not hard to find. I saw a lot of coins of Gallienus at the show. These were the three I liked best. He is the most common emperor of the third century and presided over the end of silver coinage that contained enough silver to look gray. All three of these coins came late enough in the reign that they were issued with a silver wash but only one of these still has enough silver to remind us of that fact.
Great additions. The first one is very interesting. Learned something with that. Definitely shows how much there is to learn to find little treasures on the cheap like that. Cool doubling on the third.
