Description
You receive 1 Roman coin struck by the Emperor Constantine & his sons from 330-346 AD to celebrate the foundation of Constantinople as the new capital of the Empire, & the traditional position of Rome as the cultural & moral center of the Empire from the group seen here. These were issued to mark the foundation of Constantinople & to also re-affirm Rome as the traditional center of the Empire. Thirteen mints produced these types: Trier, Lugdunum (Lyons), Arelate (Arles), Aquileia, Rome, Siscia, Thessalonica, Heraclea, Constantinople, Nicomedia, Cyzicus, Antioch & Alexandria. The two most common are the CONSTANTINOPOLIS (Victory on a prow) & VRBS ROMA (wolf & twins) types. The female figure on the obverse is the personification of Constantinople or Rome. The victory on a prow type alludes to the naval victory of Crispus & his subsequent capture of Byzantium (soon to be re-named Constantinople). Zosimus said that Constantine's fleet had 200 ships & Licinius had 350 ships. Zosimus might have exaggerated, but all sources agreed that Constantine's fleet was greatly outnumbered. What accounted for the surprise victory of Constantine's forces? Could it have been that Constantine had better trained sailors...maybe divine providence? A papyrus letter from circa A.D. 323, gives an answer. The letter is from a procurator who said that the government of Egypt had an urgent requirement of box & acanthus wood for repair of the men-at-war vessels in the arsenals of Memphis & Babylon. Egypt sent a total of 130 ships to serve in the navy of Licinius, but it seems that they were all old tubs! The description in RIC describes Constantinopolis as holding reversed spear . This object might actually be a scepter, rather than a reversed spear. Compare the object with the scepter that the victory on the reverse is holding. The ends are alikethey both end in small globes. On some coins, Constantinopolis is holding what might be considered a cross - scepter with a globe (often topped with a smaller globe). This may or may not have had Christian significance, but Constantine first used this symbolism in A.D. 315 on a silver medallion, which also has a chi-rho on the crest, issued in Ticinum. The cross-scepter imagery was later an imperial attribute & sign of power on some gold coins of Valentinian III. This symbolism, & other imagery, may not have been understood by many people at the time, though. in the sixth century, John of Ephesus wrote that the general public believed that the figure of Constantinopolis on gold coins of Justin II was actually Venus.2 It seems that a lot of the message of ancient coins was lost on the audience! Palladas, a fourth-century pagan poet, wrote mockingly about the city of Constantinople & coins with Victories on the prow "Here we are, the Victories, the laughing maidens, bearing victories to the Christ-loving city. Those who loved the city fashioned us, stamping figures appropriate to the victories." (Anth. Plan. 282) The mints of
