PHRYGIA CADI Claudius I 41-54 AD bronze

Description

Claudius I had some minor physical problems and was pushed aside by his more assertive relatives in the game of personal politics that was the early Roman Empire. When Caligula was assassinated he was the last adult male of the Julian family and was acclaimed by the Praetorian Guard. He turned out to be an honest and efficient administrator.

A city that got its start in Hellenistic times and endured into the Byzantine period.

In Classical Ancient times Phrygia was a landlocked region of western central Anatolia.

The Romans, as they were building their empire, preferred to let the local coinage arrangements remain in place. As they developed their political system into the Cult of Personality that was the Empire, they started putting imperial portraits on the local coins. Later, as the Empire began to shrink, they preferred to centralize their coinage operations, eliminating local control. There were also allied and client states, some of which, at times, issued coins celebrating the alliance or subservience. The main catalog reference for these coins on this web site is Greek Imperial Coins and their Values, by David Sear.

Ancient Coins includes Greek and Roman coins and those of neighbors and successors, geographically from Morocco and Spain all the way to Afghanistan. Date ranges for these begin with the world’s earliest coins of the 8th century BC to, in an extreme case, the end of Byzantine Empire, 1453 AD.