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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;curtislclay, post: 4585104, member: 89514&quot;]I&#039;d say your second explanation is correct: the engravers were instructed to depict the seven animals specified by Cassius Dio and by the Saecular Games inscription, but they sometimes made minor mistakes in doing so.</p><p><br /></p><p>It seems indubitable that there was a hunt of 100 each of the named seven animals on the last day of the Saecular Games of 204, since this fact is attested not only by Cassius Dio, a highly reliable senatorial historian who was alive and writing his history at that very time, but also in the official account of the games which was inscribed on marble panels set up in Rome for all to read. And surely no one will doubt that the LAETITIA TEMPORVM coin type commemorated this particular show of 204: not only does the coin type consistently show precisely seven animals, some of them clearly identical with the ones mentioned by Dio and the inscription, but Dio also explains why 700 animals were included in the hunt (because the Saecular Games lasted seven days), and the adornment of the spina as a ship in the coin type jibes with Dio&#039;s statement that the receptacle for the animals was shaped like a ship. I think Septimius would have had little motivation to repeat exactly the same show, with the same seven kinds of animal and the receptacle similarly shaped like a boat, at any other time during his reign!</p><p><br /></p><p>Indeed, the correspondence between Dio&#039;s account and the coin type is so close that the two have been recognized as relating to the same games since the early days of numismatic scholarship. What is remarkable, however, is that most numismatists throughout the centuries, having accepted this explanation of the coin type, nevertheless did not make the obvious deduction that the seven animals shown in the coin type must therefore be the same seven named by Dio, but rather tried to identify the animals, making many mistakes, solely on the basis of what they looked like on the coins of this type accessible to them!</p><p><br /></p><p>Precisely what animal Dio&#039;s bisons were is only a secondary question, which I leave it to others to speculate about, and maybe even solve.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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