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Message:: [QUOTE="Roman Collector, post: 4950270, member: 75937"]I can see the logic behind using metal composition as a dividing line. You have to draw a line somewhere because there's no clear demarcation, one reign sort of melds into another. However, I think the coins of the mid-third century are much more similar to coins issued two centuries previously than they are to the coins issued only 50 years later. Coins of this era exist in recognizable denominations and with traditional pagan iconography. A radiate of Tetricus II, for example, apart from metal composition, is very similar to coins issued generations before it. Spes still walks left, holding a flower in one hand and raises the hem of her stola with the other, just as on a sestertius of Claudius from the first century. [ATTACH=full]1189951[/ATTACH] In contrast, coins of the Constantinian era are the product of the coinage reform of Diocletian in AD 294, and gone are the denominations of the first three centuries of imperial coinage. Moreover, they are the product of an increasingly Christian Rome, and gone are the standard depictions of the pagan pantheon. In summary, I consider "LRBC" to refer to the bronze coinage of the period historians call the "Dominate." The coins of the mid-third century, despite their debasement, clearly remain coins of the Principate, and I don't classify them as "late Roman" for this reason.[/QUOTE]