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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Sallent, post: 2831403, member: 76194&quot;]Well, in some he looks like Postumus, in some he looks like a portrait of Postumus which has been reworked on a die, and in some I suspect he looks like himself.</p><p><br /></p><p>You have to remember that when mint workers found out Postumus was dead and Marius was the new Emperor, they didn&#039;t know what Marius looked like, plus they had hundreds of dies of Postumus in the process of being engraved or already engraved. So it was expedient to simply carve Marius&#039; name on them and use them up while they waited for an official portrait of Marius to be sent to them. In less finished dies the celators would have gotten creative and modified a portrait of Postumus to look more generic.</p><p><br /></p><p>As Marius didn&#039;t last, we have all those varieties, with Postumus portraits, modified portraits of Postumus, and more accurate portraits of Marius, represented in equal numbers on his coinage.</p><p><br /></p><p>Here is a coin of Maximinus Thrax which illustrates my point. The celator took a portrait of Alexander Severus and modified it to look more generic...but he had no idea M. Thrax had such a distinctive chin or eyebrow ridge as he didn&#039;t yet know what his new emperor looked like. </p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]667413[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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