Hi everyone, I recently bought a coin carrying case with trays to reorganize my coins and this led me to reviewing the attribution of coins purchased from auction that I hadn't checked. I don't have RIC but this coin is referenced as RIC 358 - looking on Wildwinds and Vcoins I see a number of examples but all of them have a shield at Venus's feet on the left. I can't see any sign of a shield on this one and it doesn't appear that it is missing because of wear or a weak strike. I checked the fake coin reports on Forvm and don't see this one listed - at first glance it seems OK to me with the right weight and size 3.20g & 19mm but I now see some small metal deposits to the left of the bust and on the reverse - hopefully not a sign of casting. Any help with a proper attribution would be much appreciated!
Search acsearch for Mamaea venus victrix, scroll down, this coin is referenced as RIC 358 but it might be a variant. You will need google translate. I stopped at the first example found, there may be others.
There are a lot of variations in design elements on the reverse types of Roman coins, such as presence or absence of a scepter or staff, presence of children at the base of a throne, the presence or absence of a globe, etc. Most of these variants are well-described, such as this one. I have no reason to doubt the authenticity of your coin. You have an interesting coin with a lot of eye-appeal. Enjoy it.
To be clear, this is the same coin although the listing calls it a sestertius (always patronize sellers without a clue or a staff that cares). Did you buy it form ACR or has it sold more than once? I do not pretend to be able to say whether the coin is genuine or not and maintain that it is often safe to declare a coin fake from photos but dangerous to be so certain a coin is real just from a photo.
Thanks everyone - Doug is correct I did purchase this from ACR which is the reference Bing cited. Unfortunately I sometimes purchase coins based on whether I find them interesting or not and don't always pay enough attention to the descriptions (I am getting better!). Since it was obviously a denarius I must have just blown past that part of the description. This one appealed to me as I didn't have any coins of Mamaea and it also had Venus appearing with a helmet - this was interesting to me as I would not normally associate Venus with military items. It appears that one of her attributes is the granting of victory but of course she is much more well known for her less martial pursuits. Thanks!
