Three Heads Are Better Than One?
How many emperors does one coin need? or one empire? This bronze from Nikomedia answers three: the emperor Valerian, his son Gallienus, and his grandson Valerian II. The engraver did a nice job fitting all three portraits onto a flan 25 mm across. I especially like the portrait of Valerian on the left.
The coin was struck between 256 and 258 CE, during the period where Valerian II was alive and held the rank of Caesar (heir to the throne). By 260 one of the three was dead and another was a prisoner of the Persian king.
The Coin
Bithynia, Nikomedia. Valerian I, with Gallienus and Valerian II, 253-260. (Bronze, 25 mm, 8.90 g, 1 h).
Obv: Two laureate busts face each other: Valerian at left, looking right, and Gallienus at right, looking left. Both wear drapery over a cuirass (a breastplate). Below them, smaller, is the bareheaded bust of Valerian II.
The laurel wreath marks an Augustus, a reigning emperor. The bare head marks a Caesar, the designated heir who did not yet rule.
The Greek legend runs ΑΥΤ ΟΥΑΛΕΡΙΑΝΟC ΓΑΛΛΗΝΟC ΟΥΑΛΕΡΙΑΝΟC, with ΚΑΙCΑ set in the field between the two crowned heads. It translates as "Emperor Valerian, Gallienus, Valerian Caesar." ΑΥΤ abbreviates autokrator, the Greek equivalent of the Latin imperator, "emperor." The final ΚΑΙCΑ(Ρ), "Caesar," belongs to Valerian II. The names stand in the nominative case, as labels for the portraits.
Confronted busts were a familiar format on third-century civic bronzes of Bithynia and Lower Moesia, usually for an emperor paired with his wife or son. A three-portrait arrangement like this one is less common and records the brief period of a three-generation imperial family.
Rev: The legend reads ΝΙΚΟΜΗΔΕΩΝ ΤΡΙC ΝΕΩΚΟΡΩΝ, "of the Nikomedians, three times neokoros." A neokoros (temple warden) was a city that Rome allowed to host a provincial temple of the imperial cult. Each grant was a separate honor, and cities competed with each other and boasted their status on their coins.
Nikomedia's first grant is attested in Cassius Dio, Roman History 51.20.7, for 29 BCE. Octavian, the future Augustus, permitted "the Asians to have theirs in Pergamum and the Bithynians theirs in Nicomedia" (trans. Earnest Cary, Loeb 1917; LacusCurtius).
The third grant has a more complicated history. In Barbara Burrell's reconstruction (Neokoroi, 2004, nos. 159 to 161), Elagabalus granted it, Severus Alexander withdrew it, and Valerian and Gallienus restored it after Valerian II became Caesar. If Burrell is right, the reverse legend announces a recent favor, and the three portraits on the obverse name the rulers who granted it. A companion issue of the same years shows three temples with an altar, which supports the reading of this series as a celebration of the restored title.
The type shows three prize crowns. These are agonistic crowns, the tall cylindrical crowns awarded at civic festival games. The middle crown holds two palm branches and each of the flanking crowns holds one; the palm was the standard sign of a victory. The crowns advertise Nikomedia's games. The three prize crowns could echo the three neokorates and/or the three rulers.
The coin weighs 8.90 g, and its dies are aligned at 1 o'clock (the die axis, the angle between obverse and reverse). Each side has a small round depression at the center. These are flan production marks, usually explained as the point where a lathe or compass held the blank while it was shaped.
The Place: Nikomedia
Nikomedia stood at the head of the Gulf of Astakos, the long inlet of the Sea of Marmara now called the Gulf of İzmit. The modern city of İzmit occupies the site, about 100 km east of Istanbul.
King Nikomedes I of Bithynia founded the city around 264 BCE and made it his capital. Bithynia was the kingdom, and later the Roman province, covering the northwest corner of Asia Minor between the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea. Rome received the kingdom by the will of its last king, Nikomedes IV, in 74 BCE.
The city's value lay in its position. Travelers and armies crossing from Europe at Byzantium landed at Chalcedon, on the Asian shore, and the main road into Anatolia ran east from there through Nikomedia toward Ankyra (modern Ankara) and the eastern frontier. An emperor moving troops against Persia would pass through or near the city.
Nikomedia's chief rival was Nicaea (modern İznik), about 50 km to the south. Dio's account of 29 BCE already shows a division between them: Nicaea received the shrine for Roman residents, Nikomedia the temple of Augustus for the Greek provincials. Historians usually read the neokorate titles on both cities' coins as part of this long competition for first place in Bithynia.
The Events, 253 to 260 CE
The army in Raetia proclaimed Valerian emperor in 253. He soon made his adult son Gallienus a second Augustus. The two divided the work: Valerian took the East and Gallienus the West.
Valerian II, the elder son of Gallienus and his wife Cornelia Salonina, was named Caesar in 256 (some authors prefer 255). With a grandfather and a father as emperors and a grandson as heir, the dynasty now had three generations in office.
The Goths in Bithynia. During these same years, Gothic raiders came by sea from the north coast of the Black Sea. The principal source is the Greek historian Zosimos, writing about 500 CE. His New History 1.34 to 1.35 describes the sequence: the raiders crossed the Bosporus in fishermen's boats, took Chalcedon, and marched to Nikomedia.
Zosimos calls Nikomedia "a great city, celebrated for its affluence" (New History 1.35.1, anonymous translation, London 1814; Livius). He reports that the citizens fled with what they could carry, and that the Goths honoured a man named Chrysogonos, who had advised them to go there. The raiders then plundered Nicaea, Kios, Apamea, and Prusa. Floodwater on the Rhyndakos River stopped them short of Kyzikos, and on their way home they set fire to Nikomedia and Nicaea.
Zosimos gives no year. Modern historians date the raid between 256 and 258, so the burning of Nikomedia probably fell close to the striking of this coin. The end of the city's coinage is linked to the Gothic attack.
The emperor's response. Zosimos, New History 1.36.1, says that Valerian heard of the disturbances in Bithynia, sent a general named Felix to Byzantium, and marched from Antioch into Cappadocia. Plague then struck his army.
The dynasty disrupted. Valerian II died in 258, probably in Illyricum, the Danube region where he had been stationed with his father. The cause is unknown. Gallienus had him deified, and Rome struck coins for Divus Valerianus Caesar. His younger brother Saloninus became Caesar in his place.
In 260 Valerian was captured by the Persian king Shapur I near Edessa, in northern Mesopotamia. He was the first Roman emperor taken prisoner by a foreign enemy, according to the ancient tradition, and he died in captivity. Gallienus ruled alone as Augustus until his murder in 268.
Nikomedia: A Generation Later
In 284 the army acclaimed Diocletian emperor at Nikomedia, and he made the rebuilt city his principal residence. The Christian writer Lactantius, who taught rhetoric there, describes palaces, a circus, a mint, and an arms factory. Diocletian, he writes, "was continually endeavouring to equal Nicomedia with the city Rome in magnificence" (On the Deaths of the Persecutors 7, trans. William Fletcher, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 7, 1886; text).
By 293 he shared power with three colleagues: two Augusti, Diocletian and Maximian, and two Caesars, Constantius and Galerius. We call the four-ruler system the Tetrarchy. Lactantius, a hostile witness, says Diocletian "made choice of three persons to share the government with him" and so multiplied armies and taxes (On the Deaths of the Persecutors 7).
Nikomedia was the stage for the system's key moments. The first edict of the Great Persecution was posted there in February 303 (chapters 12 and 13). In May 305 Diocletian abdicated on a hill about three miles from the city, where the new Caesars were named (chapter 19).
The arrangement did not hold for long. Lactantius puts in Galerius's mouth the remark that concord could be kept "between two equals, never amongst four" (chapter 18). By 308, he counts "six who ruled the empire at one and the same time" (chapter 29).
The Nikomedian bronze of 256 to 258 shows three rulers sharing one flan, a grandfather, a father, and a son. Fifty years later the same city had seen the number rise to four and then to six.
References
Cassius Dio, Roman History 51.20.6 to 7, trans. Earnest Cary, Loeb Classical Library vol. VI (1917). LacusCurtius
Zosimos, New History 1.34 to 1.36, anonymous translation (London: Green and Chaplin, 1814). Livius, 1.35; Livius, 1.36
Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors 7, 12 to 13, 18 to 19, 29, trans. William Fletcher, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 7 (1886). EWTN text
Barbara Burrell, Neokoroi: Greek Cities and Roman Emperors (Leiden: Brill, 2004), nos. 159 to 161.
Livius, "Valerian Jr": chronology of Valerian II.
William R. Shepherd, The Historical Atlas (1911), p. 20, University of Texas Libraries, Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection.
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