I picked this up cheap and am having a hard time pinning it down. Maybe not official? FL IVL CONSTANTIVS NOB C GLORIA EXERCITVS dot TRP dot
It is pretty cool... I'm wondering what caused the "side burn" indentation. I also had a similar bowl-cut hairdo when I was younger (my mom did it at home)... The 80's. RIC VII Treveri 592 http://numismatics.org/ocre/id/ric.7.tri.592
The bust does not look official to me at all, but one does find official+unofficial die pairings in the various limes. If a counterfeiter could get his hands on a real die, he'd certainly have no issues pairing it with one of his own.
Really interesting portrait and to me it looks unofficial, doesn't have that ethereal quality to the portrait as the post-Constantine bronzes usually have. But who knows, I could be wrong.
I think that it is official and it is merely wear combined with the gouge on the cheek making it look odd. It has a haircut that I have seen on other Trier examples-- note the bit behind the ear, running down the neck...it's styled horizontally while the rest is more vertical. Here is another example (RIC 93) with similar hair.
I believe there was a large Hasidic community in Trier at the time. Constantius was just trying to fit in.
Coins from the Trier mint tend to have significant stylistic differences from the more often seen (in these days) eastern and Balkan mint products. It looks legit to me although we don't have a diameter or weight by which to compare it to the standard issue of the time. In general, this particular era - 330-337 - seems not to have been subject to the same pressures that had driven the mass copying of the VLPP centenionales in the 320's or the mass copying of FEL TEMP fallen horseman half- or reduced majorinae in the 350's. As for "Limes" - most of the area which in the early-mid 3rd century had produced the mass of cast, plated denarii erroneously referred to as "Limes" (the actual Limes Falsa types were generally undersized/underweight copies of the Æ coins of an earlier era) had by this time been incorporated into the Roman Empire proper. Also, the paucity of circulating silver made creating silvered copies sort of silly since all the circulating currency was, and had been for quite a while, silvered billon - there wasn't much profit-related reason to copy those official coins by casting copies and silvering them and little of the civil unrest which had caused widespread emergency copying to sustain business before and after that era. Sure, unofficial copies of Constantine's enormous emission of centenionales (Gloria Ex, Urbs Roma & Constantinopolis types) do exist - particularly copies of the later, smaller centenionales produced by the sons of Constantine in the same or similar patterns as the original, full-sized type of official issue, but they're seen a good bit less commonly. The OP's coin dates to the 335-7 era as the change from two to a single standard between the soldiers marked a system-wide reduction in weight for the three most common types of centenionalis, from an average of 2.5g at which the series began in 330, to an average of 1.7g ca. 335-6.
