I have seen Greek letters used as 'Officina' on Roman coins, AND I have seen alphabet letters used as 'Officina' on Roman coins, but until now I have never seen Roman Numerals used as 'Officina' on Roman coins. Can someone please tell me if this is commonplace (normal)? (See this Probus.)
It was up to each mint how the matter was handled. The most common use of Roman numerals was to resolve conflicts in a series of ordinal numbers. S was secundus or 2 but that was a problem for shop sextus or 6 since S was already used. That led to VI. Lugdunum did use all Roman numerals in exergue for Probus as shown below but more mints used Greek numberals or the ordinals. Lets also realize that the same mint was perfectly free to change the way they did things from issue to issue. The precedent for this was set early when Philip at Rome issued the first two openly marked issues with one in Roman and the other in Greek: It is our job to figure out what they were doing if not why the did it that way.
Probus used VII too... This coin reads IV but is actually VI in error. They never used IV for 4 on officina marks. Lugdunum systematically used some officina letters in retrograde, they simply happen far too often to be the oocasional engravers error. We have no idea why. Retrograde C Retrograde D
Thanks so very much P.P. for the 'reference' and Doug for the article and the information, and Martin for the examples. That is exactly what I was looking for. I have read it all, and I even understand a lot of it. It appears that as far as our knowledge (1700 years after the event) goes, the 'Officina' was randomly applied and inconsistent in it's application and form, but Roman numerals were commonly used. I thought that 'Officinae' only appeared in the 'fields' but I see that it also appeared in the 'Exergue'. I did not know that. Thank-you, again.
@ Valentinian - A VERY interesting article. I hope it stays there for a while as I have downloaded the link and although I have read about 'Officinae' there appears to be much more there, for another time. Thank-you.