Diocletian post-reform radiate; confused about RIC vi; please help

What the heck is the difference between RIC vi (Heraclea) 13 and 21?

From a bulk lot of unattributed LRBC I'm working through. Please feel free to post anything relevant!


Diocletian, AD 284-304
Roman Æ post-reform radiate, 1.74 g, 19.5 mm, 5h
Heraclea, AD 296-298
Obv: IMP C C VAL DIOCLETIANVS P F AVG, radiate, draped and cuirassed bust right, seen from front
Rev: CONCORDIA MILI-TVM, Diocletian standing right in military dress, receiving Victory on globe from Jupiter leaning on scepter; ΗΓ in lower center
Refs: RIC 13 or 21; Cohen 34; RCV 12833

The RIC listings:

 

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Weird.. I have no idea. It's like they just made a new number and year for a different officina. Nice coin though.. gotta love researching them group lots.

 

This is a typical RICism. The issue was divided in two parts. In one, coins were struck for 2 Augusti and 2 Caesars from five officinae. In the second, a sixth officina was added but no coins were struck for the Caesars. Note 2 on page 531 suggests you might order the coins by portrait head size but that would require having a hundred or so coins and a lot of assumptions that may or may not be valid. A single coin of an Augustus but not from the sixth shop (that means your coin) will not be distinguished from its mate in the other part of the issue. Remember RIC was not written for collectors but for museum workers who might actually have a hoard of hundreds of the coins and be able to separate them into groups with some validity.

Gotta love 'em.

 

Makes sense.. thanks for the explanation Doug.

 

One of my earliest buys - accession #16 - was one of these Heraclea 13 or 21 coins. If there's a difference between the two, I've never been able to tell.

 

So, while notes 2 and 3 refer to the folles with the GENIO POPV-LI ROMANI reverses specifically, you are suggesting the situation with the smaller CONCORDIA MIL-ITVM (or -TVM) coins is analogous. This makes sense. I just wish the authors of RIC vi had been more explicit.

This discussion on p. 522 again stresses the difference in head size between the folles, but sheds no additional light on the criteria they use to distinguish between the two radiate issues, unless I'm missing something.

 

I tried looking at coins on acsearch and found a few that struck me as definitely large portraits (therefore, RIC21) but the small ones were XXI pre reform coins that do not apply here. I wonder if most of what we have posted here are larger. One of the RIC notes suggests there were intermediate coins that they did not separate out. Perhaps what we should get out of this is that these coins fell in a time when Diocletian was moving from the smaller portraits of the pre-reform period to the flan filling broad issues of the syle we know on the tetrarchy large folles. The change seems more gradual than I would have felt necessary to express with two numbers but I did not write RIC and authors have to make decisions like this many times if they are to demonstrate points like this. Certainly they could have done it with footnotes saying that portraits on these coins increase in size gradually over their period of issue but it might take an impossibly huge die study to make this fully clear and no one has the resources (time or coins) to do this in a complete way. I am amazed that we have die studies of some of the Greek series (like Boehringer's works on Syracuse) but these late Roman coins needed a hundred times as many dies and I just don't see it happening. Possibly future numismatists will consider this worthy of their live's work. I doubt it. There are too many questions and so few resources.

 

Thanks, as always, for your insightful comments and observations, @dougsmit !

 

I actually have a Diocletian radiate that I presumed was a pre-reform ant but I guess not. Thanks for the insight!

 

For the most part the pre reform coins of Diocletian had xxi in exergue and were originally silvered (but few still have the silver). The post reform radiates were not silvered and never had xxi. The large folles of post reform did sometimes have xxi and were silvered but there were no pre reform folles so that is not a problem.
This is an Antioch pre reform antoninianus with officina in field and xxi in exergue.