SUALLY, I THINK, the eye sees what it expects to see. That was certainly the case for me with the coin I will talk about today, RPC 2272 corr--
This is one of my best coins; I love what time has done to it. Minted by a fascinating historical figure, Herod Agrippa II (my favorite Herodian), the good-natured and benevolent king of the Jews who appears in Acts 25-26, the obverse inscription is Latin and the reverse is Greek. The obverse date is COS XII, 86 A.D. The reverse date, ET Kς, Agrippa's Regnal Year 26 (85/86), places the striking of this coin somewhere toward the beginning of 86.
It is the Latin inscription on this coin which gives me pause. Although I had examined it closely a number of times, only recently have I noticed something odd. RPC gives the inscription IMP CA D VES F DOM AVG GER COS XII. What my coin reads instead is IM CA D VES F DOM AV GER COS XII. Note that the P is dropped from IMP (indistinct in this photograph) and that the G is dropped from AVG.
So, I'm thinking, a variant! Very cool. But then I look at the plate coin in RPC. Same lettering as my coin. I also compare the inscription given for RPC 2271, RPC 2272's companion coin, which I don't happen to own, and there is the same discrepancy for that coin between what the catalog lists and what the plate shows.
So now I'm guessing that a correction needs to be pointed out, unless coins with the listed inscription do happen to exist as well. There are friends of this website who have been kind enough from time to time to send photos of coins in their collections either verifying of counter-verifying claims that I have made in my blog articles. Perhaps these collectors will do so again in this case. In the meantime I will call this coin "RPC 2272 corr" instead of "RPC 2272 var."
Next: Maybe something interesting about a Roman issue.
