PISIDIA ANTIOCH Caracalla 198-217 AD bronze

Description

Antioch in Pisidia was a town in west-central Anatolia. Not to be confused the Antioch on the Orontes. It was founded by Seleukos I in honor of his father, one of 16 such commemorative towns.

Pisidia was a stretch of west-central southern Anatolia and some hinterland. It had a reputation for trouble. Conquerors came and regretted it. They resisted Greek culture longer than all of their neighbors. They were formally part of various Hellenistic kingdoms before they passed to Rome. Resistance continued. Rome sent colonists, who gradually Latinized the region.

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.