442, Lot: 535. Estimate $100. Sold for $95. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee.

Saloninus. As Caesar, AD 258-260. Antoninianus (20.5mm, 2.88 g, 11h). Contemporary forgery, hybrid with reverse of Postumus. SALON VALERIANVS CAES, radiate and draped bust right / HERC PACIFERO, Hercules standing left, holding olive branch, club and lion-skin. Reverse of Postumus, AGK 27, RIC V 67. VF, brown surfaces, some tan and green earthen deposits.

Ex Berk BBS 114 (23 May 2000), lot 433.

The Harlan Berk catalogue note described this coin as ‘probably a counterfeit produced from official dies by unscrupulous mint workers under Postumus, using a current reverse die of Postumus but an obverse die of Saloninus as Caesar before Postumus’[s] revolt’. While not discounting this hypothesis out of hand, it does seem very improbable. The reverse type was not introduced to Postumus’s coinage until AD 262, according to AGK, and we would have to assume therefore that an old die of Saloninus Caesar was still lying around at least a year and a half after his capture and murder. Even if this were the case, it would have been an extremely risky, and rather pointless, exercise for any mint worker to have struck coins in the name of Postumus’s defeated enemy after so long an interval. This coin is in extremely base metal, and I consider it more likely that it is a cast from skilfully produced moulds taken from coins of the two successive emperors, and that the coin is the work of a counterfeiter’s workshop.