So the weird thing about this coin issue is that apparently the moneyer only made unciae and semuncia. What’s up with that? Some guesses. 1) Tubulus also made the anonymous issue 287/1 (no proof, wild speculation, do not quote me as believing this!); 2) The moneyers in the annual college got to mint in order of their being returned in the election but were only allowed to produce as much coinage as was prescribed by the quaestor urbanus or the senate etc… (again don’t quote me, I’m being creative here), perhaps by Tubulus’ turn they didn’t need any large value issue and he decided to mint more coins by striking small change?!; 3) He made a radical choice to break tradition because it was popular?!?!?!
We’ll likely never know. Ok. To the evidence and away from flights of fancy! Let’s start with Schaefer this time. He has 28 specimens in his photo archive. Now I get to cross ref them with CRRO and CoinArchive and Acsearch.info… Back soon with an update. Scroll down for findings.
I’ve finished checking trade an CRRO for specimens not in Schaefe I decided they need their own sheet in my Unciae workbook, so if you go to Unciae in my Google sheets look at the bottom for a Tubulus tab for the specimens I’ve transcribed and their corresponding URLs. 35 specimens (so far) have weights. Do you know of a specimen I missed?! Let me know!
At least 21 dies from some 44 known specimens suggests a large issue with many missing specimens…. Note I’ve not checked specimens not in Schaefer for links or non-links. Regardless I think we can safely say this is a far larger issue than any of the earlier ones…
Liv Mariah Yarrow 