Theodosius I Ae2 Aquileia

That's a beautiful coin you have there. Great patina and detail for sure. I think I'd keep it and give potential dad-in-law something less beautiful. As for RIC, it doesn't specify die pairs just obverse and reverse style

Very nice I also have a Theodosius I (a Gloria Romanorum, emperor standing w/labarum type), minted in Constantinople. Not as good as yours (or rather, your father-in-law's), but I still like it; it has character. Again, nice coin.

The photo is excellent and shows the coin beautifully.

RIC, in this period, separates out only the major type and legend variations not anywhere near the die variety level. There may have been hundreds of dies used for this exact coin. Very few die studies have been done for Late Romans. Most mints used more than one workshop to make the same coins and the workshop numbers were not cataloged separately in RIC although they did list what ones were known to the authors. Here we have the mintmark SMAQS or Sacred Money of the Aquilea mint Secundus (2nd) shop. You might find a similar mark ending in P for Primus (first). RIC would tell you if the coin is available from other shops but all would be covered by the same RIC number. Various mints used various methods of numbering the shops so you need to study the patterns used separately. If this same exact coin were made at a different mint, the entire mintmark would be different and the coin would be cataloged many pages away from this one since the RIC numbers started over for each mint. I consider it very inappropriate to quote RIC numbers without giving either the mint name (RIC 30d Aquilea) or a page reference (RIC 30d page 100).


Also in this period RIC listed coins together as they were issued by multiple joint rulers so the next listing above or below this one was quite likely not a coin of Theodosius but of one of his family. In some RIC volumes, such similar coins for different rulers would get a whole new number while sometimes they added a letter like this 30d to separate the coin from 30c which is a similar coin of Valentinian II.

http://esty.ancients.info/ricix/type18i.html

The above link is Warren Esty's page on this type showing several rulers and several mints. If you look through his examples you will find a Theodosius with mintmark SMAQP and a Valentinian II with SMAQS.

I have a page on using RIC that might help but my examples were all earlier from the Constantinian period:
http://www.forumancientcoins.com/do...h/idric.html