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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 2836156, member: 19463&quot;][ATTACH=full]669700[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]669703[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>I tried looking at coins on acsearch and found a few that struck me as definitely&nbsp; large portraits (therefore, RIC21) but the small ones were XXI pre reform coins that do not apply here.&nbsp; I wonder if most of what we have posted here are larger.&nbsp; One of the RIC notes suggests there were intermediate coins that they did not separate out.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I am amazed that we have die studies of some of the Greek series (like Boehringer&#039;s works on Syracuse) but these late Roman coins needed a hundred times as many dies and I just don&#039;t see it happening.&nbsp; Possibly future numismatists will consider this worthy of their live&#039;s work.&nbsp; I doubt it. There are too many questions and so few resources.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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