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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;DonnaML, post: 8212459, member: 110350&quot;][USER=117268]@Amit Vyas[/USER] and [USER=19463]@dougsmit[/USER], I&#039;m sorry I neglected to mention the other two &quot;usual suspects&quot; besides the emperor for the portrayal accompanying a VIRTVS legend when it isn&#039;t Virtus herself being depicted, namely Mars and &quot;a soldier.&quot; (If I recall correctly, the latter is how RIC usually identifies the figure.)</p><p><br /></p><p>By the way, I wouldn&#039;t rely too much on David Sear when it comes to Virtus: for some reason, he seems unwilling to recognize the overwhelming weight of authority (scholarly, grammatical, and numismatic) agreeing that Virtus, when portrayed as such, is a female personification -- for details, you can do a search for my previous posts on the subject using &quot;Virtus&quot; and &quot;female&quot; as the search terms. Inexplicably, in the glossary in front of each volume of RCV, he identifies her as a male personification.</p><p><br /></p><p>Looking at the other examples of these two Gordian III &quot;VIRTVS AVG&quot; types available on VCoins, it&#039;s rather clear from the best-preserved specimens that all the ones showing Virtus holding a branch on the reverse and having the same obverse legend as your coin (as well as at least one with the &quot;PIVS&quot; obverse legend) portray a male figure, mostly wearing what appears to be a cuirass completely covering his chest up to the neck; some certainly seem to be bearded. And that all the ones showing Virtus without a branch, with her hand on her shield, with the &quot;M ANT&quot; obverse legend, are portraying Virtus herself, with a bare right breast.</p><p><br /></p><p>Some examples of the male figure, one of them a sestertius with the PIVS legend:</p><p>[ATTACH=full]1441119[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1441120[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1441121[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>Two examples of the female figure:</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1441122[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1441123[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>No matter how well-informed they usually are, 98% of dealers entirely miss this distinction when they describe &quot;VIRTVS&quot; coins.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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