410, Lot: 190. Estimate $500. Sold for $360. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee.

CARIA, Alinda. Caracalla, with Plautilla. AD 198-217. Æ (39mm, 24.01 g, 6h). M. Ulpius Uliades, magistrate. Struck circa AD 202-203. AV K M A-[VP ANTΩ]NINOC N(εα) Θ(εα) H(ρα) ΠΛAVTIΛΛ, confronted busts of Caracalla right, laureate, draped, and cuirassed, and Plautilla left, draped and wearing stephane; c/m: laureate head right / Apollo standing facing, head left, holding plectrum and lyre. Karl 79; SNG von Aulock 2413; for c/m: Howgego 77. VF, brown patina.

Three Carian cities - Alinda, Alabanda, and Stratonicea - commemorated the marriage between Caracalla and Plautilla by issuing coins with dual portraits proclaiming the young empress as “the new goddess Hera.” As Ken Harl notes (Civic Coins and Civic Politics in the Roman East: A.D. 180-275 [Berkeley, CA: University of California Press], p. 41): “By implication, Caracalla was envisioned as a youthful Zeus, so that the imperial marriage became a symbolic reenactment of the celestial one.”