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Message:: [QUOTE="Ocatarinetabellatchitchix, post: 3962629, member: 99554"]ValentinianIIAe 2 5.18g.  24 mm.  AntiochDN VALENTINIANVS PF AVG / GLORIA RO-MANORVM[ATTACH=full]1043656[/ATTACH] I won some nice coins at the last Ares Numismatic auctions. This one is an upgrade of my (very) worn Valentinian II specimen. Got it for peanuts. But when the time came for me to verify the exact attribution, I suddenly remembered that it’s a real challenge to distinguish some issues between the father and the son. Here are some reasons why :They often have the same obverse legend on their coins.Portraits are very similar on their coinage.Many times they both share the same reverse, same types and their coins were strucked at the 15 same mints...So how is it possible to make the difference between Val Senior and Junior? There is no simple answer or trick. We have to use a combination of observation to discover who is the good emperor on our coins. Then I present to you the result of my research, hoping it would help you sometimes in the future. The obverse legendThe most common legend that both rulers share is DN VALENTINIANVS PF AVG. But by the time of Valentinian I it had become a fixed convention that a reigning emperor always have a broken legend . For the romans the unbroken legend was the mark of an Augustus who was not merely a boy in years but was still under the guardianship of a reigning father or elder brother. Another clue : after the death of Val Senior, Val II had initially an unbroken legend or the addition of IVN that made it clear who he was. “When the distinction was no longer felt to be necessary, his legend would be the same as his father’s”(RIC IX xxxviii). Let’s remember here that the letters IVN (iuventis) means “junior”. So to make things clear, if your Valentinian coin has a continuous obverse legend or the IVN, it is surely Val Junior. But if you have the broken legend, be careful because 100% of Val I coins has this characteristic but around 30% of Val II coinage has it too... The portraitValentinian I was Augustus from 364 AD to 375 AD. He was 43 years old at the beginning of his reign and died at the age of 54. His son then became Emperor at she age of 4 (!) and was found hanged in his residence in 392 AD at the age of 21. So on his coinage Junior is depicted younger and thinner, some says even weaker. At the opposite, the father’s appearance looks older with a full, heavy face. It is not an absolute way to distinguish the 2 men, but after examining hundreds of pictures of them I’d say it’s a quite reliable rule to identifying them. The reverse legendLike it was explained before, Val I and II share several reverse legend and types. Meanwhile, some of them had only been use for one of the rulers. Here they are : [ATTACH=full]1043666[/ATTACH] ConclusionThe reason why we love so much collecting coins is because we can learn something new every day. We like it when we have to dig deep for researching and identifying our little treasures. The Valentinians are emperors who sometimes give us headaches, but that’s part of the fun, don’t you think so ? Please show me your Val I and Val II examples !                                                                       [/QUOTE]

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