TROAS, ALEXANDRIA TROAS, Gallienus, 253-268 AD, bronze

Description

Alexandria Troas It was an important town in Roman times. Constantine considered making it his eastern capital.

Troas, or the Troad, is a region of the far northwest coast of Anatolia. Settled by Greeks before Alexander the Great, it was seeded with colonists by the Macedonian regent Antigonus after Alexander’s death.

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.