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138

ON A COIN OF A SECOND CARAUSIUS,

CÆSAR IN BRITAIN IN THE FIFTH CENTURY.

BY ARTHUR J. EVANS, M.A., F.S.A.

(Reprinted from the Numismatic Chronicle, vol. vii, 3rd Series, pp. 191-219, by kind permission of the Council of the Numismatic Society, with the sanction of the Author.)

THE remarkable bronze coin of which the engraving appears above happened to strike my observation amongst a lot of Roman and Romano-barbarous coins found at Richborough, the famous Rutupis or Rutupiæ of the ancients. The obverse presents a head modelled in a somewhat barbarous fashion on that of a fourthcentury Emperor, diademed, and with the bust draped in the paludamentum. The legend, reading outwards, is:

DOMINO CARAVSIO CES

(the AR, VSI, and Es in ligature). The reverse presents a familiar bronze type of Constans or Constantius II. The Emperor, holding phoenix and labarum standard, stands at the prow of a vessel, the rudder of which is held by Victory. In the present case, however, in place of the usual legend that accompanies this reverse-FEL. TEMP REPARATIO appears the strange and unparalleled inscription—

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The last three letters of CONTA. . . are in contiguity,

1 The Emperor's legs are omitted, as also a part of the fore part of the vessel, as if to make room for the inscription NO.

followed by uncertain traces of another, and the No is placed over the fore part of the vessel; in the field to the left are apparently three pellets. The exergual inscription is invisible. The coin bears traces of having been washed with white metal, and it weighs 421 grains.

It will be seen at once that, though both in its obverse and reverse designs approaching known fourthcentury types, the present piece is not a mere barbarous imitation of a coin of Constans or Constantius II. It presents us, on the contrary, with a definite and wholly original legend of its own. The name of the Cæsar represented is clearly given as Carausius, but the whole character of the design and the reverse type, which only makes its appearance on the imperial dies towards the middle of the fourth century, absolutely prohibit us from attributing it to the wellknown usurper who reigned from 287 to 293, and who, moreover, always claimed the title of Augustus.

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The present official style is wholly unexampled on a Roman coin. D N for DOMINVS NOSTER becomes, of course, usual on coins from Constantine's time onwards, and DOMINOR. NOSTROR. CAESS is also frequent, but the title DOMINO, standing alone without qualifying pronoun, as it appears on this coin, is as exceptional a phenomenon as the legend on the remarkable piece of an earlier date, in which the titles DEO ET DOMINO are coupled with the name of Aurelian.'

The

The CONTA.. of the reverse is enigmatic. Romano-British tendency, of which other examples will be given, to omit unaccented i's in certain positions, would make COMT. . (which, owing to the ligature of the N and T, is a possible version of the legend) a thoroughly legitimate abbreviation for COMIT. . in the same way as on a Roman inscription found in Britain we find MILTum for MILITUM. But a numismatic reference to a COMES AVGVSTI other than a god

1 DEO ET DOMINO NATO AVRELIANO AVG.

does not exist, and we can hardly venture to look for it even on so exceptional a piece as the present. I will leave it, therefore, for others to detect upon our coin the sentinel form of a Comes Littoris Saxonici looking forth from the prow of his galley in expectation of the Saxon pirate, and will content myself with the suggestion that either an s has been carelessly omitted, in which case CONTA. . stands for CONSTA, or that the x-like crossing of the second and third stroke of the N indicates the presence of an x. According to the analogy of late Romano-British inscriptions, an x may stand for an s, and we should have here cONXTA..

CONSTA, as on a Romano-British monument we find CELEXTI for CELESTI.1 The effaced traces of letters which follow I venture to read NTI in ligature, and if the NO above the prow of the vessel, which evidently forms the continuation of the legend, be joined on to the rest, we get the form CONXTA[NTI]NO for CONSTAN

TINO.

The prototype of the reverse design of our coin, representing the Emperor standing on the prow of a galley steered by Victory, and holding the phoenix and labarum standard, is one of the commonest of the fourth-century imperial types, and its date can be fixed within certain limits. The issue of the class of coins to which it belongs is conterminous with the last period of the reign of the Emperor Constans, and the contemporary portion of that of Constantius II. It is not found on the coins of Constantine the younger, who met his death in 340 A.D. On the other hand, at the moment of Constans' murder, and the consequent accession of Magnentius in 350, it seems to have been already superseded by the allied type on which the phoenix is replaced by a globe and Victory. On the coins of Magnentius, as on those of Constantius Gallus, who was associated by Constantius II in 351, only this later variety appears.

1 Inscriptiones Britannia Christianæ, 128. Similarly on African inscriptions, MILEX for MILES, XANC(tissimo) for SANC(tissimo); on Italian XANTISSIMVS, etc.

We are thus enabled to establish a terminus a quo in two directions for the period during which the class of coins that supplies the prototype of the present piece was issued from the imperial mints. Its emission cannot well have been earlier than 340 or later than 350 A.D. But there seem to me to be sufficient grounds for fixing the date of this type within still narrower limits. Evidently it records a maritime expedition; and in the case of the Emperor Constans this maritime expedition is not far to seek. In other words, it must refer to Constans' passage to Britain in 343, in answer to the appeal of the hard-pressed Provincials-one of the most important episodes in his reign, as may be gathered from the reference to it in the later books of Ammianus Marcellinus; though, alas! a full account of it, recorded in an earlier book of the same author, together with his notice of British geography, has perished. The connection of the present type with this British expedition is rendered still more probable by its close analogy with a more elaborate composition on a contorniate medal of the same Emperor, which was certainly commemorative of that event. On the reverse of this medal the Emperor stands on a galley, in the attitude of a champion, armed with spear and shield. Behind him are two standards, and the prow is headed by a Victory holding a wreath. A nymph directs the course of the galley, and behind is a tower, explained by the inscription BONONIA OCEANEN. -Bononia Oceanensis, as Boulogne-sur-Mer seems to have been known, to distinguish it from its namesake of the Æmilia. Bononia was the natural crossing-point for Britain; and accordingly we find a law of Constans in the Theodosian Code, dated from that city in January 343.2 By the end of June, in the same year, as we know from the

1 Lib. xx, l. 1; xxvii, 8, 4.

2 Cod. Theod., vol. iv, p. 117. Gothofred rightly corrects Constantius into Constans.

same source, Constans was back again at Trier.1 Assuming this maritime expedition of Constans to have give occasion to the issue of the above class of coins, their date of emission is further limited between the years 343 and 350.

There can, however, I venture to think, be little doubt that the coin with which we are at present concerned belongs to a considerably later date than its prototype. It is, indeed, notorious that the coins of Constantine and his family, being the commonest of the fourth-century issues, continued, especially in Britain, where they were not so abundantly succeeded by the issues of later Emperors, to be current down to the sixth and seventh centuries. It is to imitations of these types, indeed, that we owe our earliest English coinage; and though the Sceatta series hardly dates from an earlier period than the seventh century, there are not wanting earlier examples of more or less exact reproductions of fourth-century Roman coins in this country and elsewhere. These Constantinian types formed the basis of a long series of Northern bracteates -Scandinavian, Frisian, and Anglo-Saxon-as well as of some sixth-century Merovingian coinages, and a noteworthy example of a revival of the same kind is to be found in the gold solidus, supposed to date from about the year 600,3 presenting on the obverse the head and blundered superscription of a coin of Honorius, and on the reverse the well-known type of the Emperor holding the labarum and the globe, surmounted by Victory, and setting his foot upon a captive, here associated with a Runic inscription. It is a reversion

1 Cf. Clinton, Fasti Romani, ad ann.

2 I am glad to see that Mr. C. F. Keary, in his Catalogue of English Coins, has renounced his former opinion (Num. Chron., 1879, p. 441) that the wolf and twins type was derived from the rare denarius of Carausius, and in this case, as in that of the "Standard" type, accepts a Constantinian origin.

3 See Dr. Wimmer's remarks in Keary's Catalogue of English Coins, p. lxxxiv et seqq.

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