375, Lot: 687. Estimate $200. Sold for $220. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee.

Hadrian. AD 117-138. Æ As (26mm, 12.50 g, 6h). Rome mint. Struck circa AD 134-138. Laureate and draped bust right / Salus seated left, holding patera over lit altar before her. RIC II 833 var. (obv. bust type). VF, dark green and brown patina, smoothing.

RIC describes the reverse of this type as “Salus seated l., feeding snake coiled round altar and resting l. arm on chair,” but there is not any evidence of a snake coiled round the altar on this coin. Also, on the only other specimen sold by CNG in E-Sale 213, lot 431, the cataloguer noted the absence of the snake, but assumed it was missing due to the coin being “heavily smoothed and tooled.” While the surfaces of this coin have been smoothed, there is not any evidence of any tooling that would have removed a significant design feature such as a snake. A search of CoinArchives finds one specimen sold by Stack’s Bowers and Ponterio (Ebert Collection, Sale 174, lot 5244) that does have the snake coiled round the altar, so it appears that our type may be a sub-variety of RIC 833.