ROMAN EMPEROR GALLIENUS_________AE / BL Antoninianus_________SOL HOLDING GLOBE

Description

19E20
FRASCATIUS ANCIENTS
A BEAUTIFUL ROMAN IMPERIAL AE / BILLON ANTONINIANUS OF PUBLIUS LICINIUS EGNATIUS GALLIENUS FROM 253 - 268 AD.
GALLIENUS WAS MURDERED BY HIS OWN GENERALS
THE SIZE IS 18.7 MM AND 2.31 GRAMS.
Sear 2983
OBVERSE – Radiate & draped bust of Gallienus right
REVERSE – ORIENS AVG, Sol standing right, holding globe and raising hand
EMPEROR
Publius Licinius Egnatius Gallienus was born in about AD 213. This means that he was about 40 years old when his father Valerian, in AD 253, was hailed emperor by his troops in Raetia. Gallienus was made Caesar immediately by his father. But within a month, when Valerian got to Rome, Gallienus received the rank of Augustus.
Compared to other Roman emperors of the age, Gallienus was an exception, as far as he was not a soldier-emperor. He was rather a thoughtful, intellectual ruler, possessing sophisticated Greek tastes. However, this made him deeply unpopular with the gritty Danubian generals, who very much understood it as their right to choose a leader among their own ranks to rule the empire.
Gallienus was a Roman emperor from 253, when he was named Caesar -- following the senate appointment of his father Valerian to Augustus -- until his murder by his own generals in 268 during the siege of Milan. Shortly after becoming Caesar, Valerian elevated him to co-emperor putting Gallienus in charge in the West. Gallienus campaigned against Goths, Germans, and barbarians along the Danube. In 259-60, Shapur I, king of the Persians, captured and killed Gallienus' father.
In 267, when the Goths attacked, Gallienus set out again to fight them. Aureolus, in charge of the cavalry in Milan, rebelled, and so Gallienus returned to handle it. It was at this point that Gallienus was murdered by a group of generals who included the next emperor, Claudius II. Gallienus' is counted among those emperors who opposed the senatorial class, Caligula, Nero, Domitian, and Septimius Severus.
IMPERIAL ROME
Imperial Rome was the post-Republican period of the ancient Roman civilization, characterized by an autocratic form of government and large territorial holdings around the Mediterranean in Europe, Africa, and Asia. The 500-year-old Roman Republic, which preceded it, had been destabilized through a series of civil wars. Several events marked the transition from Republic to Empire, including Julius Caesar's appointment as perpetual dictator (44 BC); the Battle of Actium; and the granting of the honorific Augustus to Octavian by the Roman Senate .
The first two centuries of the Empire were a period of unprecedented stability and prosperity known as the Pax Romana ("Roman Peace"). It reached its greatest expanse during the reign of Trajan. In the 3rd century, the Empire underwent a crisis that threatened its existence, but was reunified and stabilized under the emperors Aurelian and Diocletian. Christians rose to power in the 4th century, during which time a system of dual rule was developed in the Latin West and Greek East. After the collapse of central government in the West in the 5th century, the eastern half continued as what would later be known as the Byzantine Empire.
Because of the Empire's vast extent and long endurance, the institutions and culture of Rome had a profound and lasting influence on the development of language, religion, architecture, philosophy, law, and forms of government in the territory it governed, particularly Europe, and by means of European expansionism throughout the modern world.
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