One family. Nine coins. A father who steadied a crumbling empire, a son who rebuilt it as something entirely new, a grandson murdered on his father’s orders, and three brothers who spent the rest of the century trying to kill each other over what was left. This collection holds an unusually deep run through the Constantinian dynasty — Constantius I Chlorus, Constantine the Great across five separate issues, Crispus, Constantine II, Constans I, Constantius II across three issues, and the doomed rival Maxentius. Lined up together, they trace the exact moment Rome stopped being a pagan empire and started becoming a Christian one.
Constantius I Chlorus: The Quiet Foundation
Every dynasty needs a steady hand at the start, and Constantius I Chlorus was Rome’s. As one of the four rulers of Diocletian’s Tetrarchy — the power-sharing system designed to stop the empire from tearing itself apart — Constantius held the western provinces with a competence that history has mostly forgotten in favor of his far more famous son.
His Genius follis in the collection is textbook Tetrarchic coinage: the laureate portrait on the obverse, and on the reverse, Genius — the personification of the Roman people’s collective spirit — standing with a patera and cornucopia. It’s stable, institutional, almost deliberately unremarkable. That was the entire point of Tetrarchic propaganda: four rulers, one shared visual language, no individual personality allowed to overshadow the system. Examples from the Rauceby Hoard — one of the largest Roman coin caches ever found in Britain — included folles of exactly this type, buried around AD 307, just as Constantius’s son was making his first moves toward power.
Constantius died at York in AD 306 while campaigning in Britain, and his troops immediately acclaimed his son as Augustus on the spot — a moment that broke the entire Tetrarchic system and set the dynasty in motion. Fittingly, Constantius himself later received the same posthumous honor this collection has already explored in depth: he was voted divus by the Senate, and his consecration coinage shows the same eagle-and-altar imagery covered in our piece on Roman coins issued after an emperor’s death — DIVO CONSTANTIO on the obverse, the soul of the first Constantinian emperor ascending exactly the way Antoninus Pius’s and Marcus Aurelius’s had a century and a half earlier.
Constantine the Great: Five Coins, One Revolution
No single reign in this collection is represented as thoroughly as Constantine’s, and for good reason — few reigns in Roman history did more to reshape what an emperor’s coinage was for.
The earliest of the five issues are pure soldier-emperor coinage: the GLORIA EXERCITVS Two Soldiers follis struck at Heraclea and a related Two Soldiers issue, both showing a pair of legionaries flanking a single military standard. This was the bread-and-butter messaging of the fourth-century army — pay the troops, remind them who pays them, keep the legions loyal. A third follis in the collection carries the Campgate reverse, the fortified gate-and-turret design that dominated Constantinian mints for years, a visual shorthand for frontier security at a moment when frontier security was everything.
Then the imagery shifts, and this is where Constantine earns the rest of his reputation. By the 320s, the openly pagan reverse types that had run continuously since Augustus — gods, personifications, sacrificial scenes — begin disappearing from his coinage. Constantine had legalized Christianity with the Edict of Milan in 313, following his victory over Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge the year before, and over the following decade the message on Roman bronze quietly changed to match.
The clearest statement of all comes after his death. The Divus Constantine I quadriga follis in the collection shows the late emperor, veiled, driving a four-horse chariot toward the sky while a hand reaches down from above to receive him. It is, on its surface, the same consecration formula every divus coin in this dynasty follows — but the hand of God replacing the eagle of the old pagan rite is not a small substitution. It’s the entire theological shift of the fourth century compressed into a single die. The man who legalized Christianity got an apotheosis scene built for a Christian cosmos.
Crispus: The Heir Who Vanished
The most haunting coin in this cluster belongs to the son who should have inherited everything and got none of it.
Crispus, Constantine’s eldest son by his first union with Minervina, was made Caesar in AD 317 at around age twelve and given real command — defeating the Franks on the Rhine in 320, then commanding his father’s fleet to a decisive naval victory over Licinius’s forces in the Hellespont in 324. The collection’s Crispus follis, a VOT X issue struck at Aquileia, belongs to exactly this high point: the “vows for the tenth anniversary” type, struck to mark a decade of stable rule, the kind of coin issued when a regime expects to keep going. Eusebius, writing in Crispus’s lifetime, called him an emperor “comparable to his father.”
Two years later, in 326, Constantine ordered his own son executed at Pola, on charges — almost certainly fabricated, the details still debated by historians — involving his stepmother Fausta, who was killed soon after in circumstances just as murky. Crispus suffered damnatio memoriae: his name struck from inscriptions, his image removed where it could be reached. The coins survived only because there were simply too many of them in circulation to recall. A VOT X follis like this one is one of the few places Crispus’s brief, brilliant career still exists exactly as it was meant to be remembered — before his father erased the rest.
The Brothers: Constantine II, Constans I, and a Decade of Civil War
When Constantine the Great died in 337, he left the empire divided among three surviving sons, each ruling a separate territory as co-Augustus. It did not go well.
Constantine II, the eldest, received Gaul, Britain, and Spain — but felt cheated by the division and invaded his younger brother Constans’s Italian territory in 340. Constans had been warned and met him near Aquileia, where Constantine II was killed in battle, just three years into his reign. The collection’s Constantine II follis shows the same Two Soldiers reverse type his father had used decades earlier — proof that the visual language Constantine the Great built for his army endured even as his sons turned that army on each other. Constans, left as sole ruler of the West for the next decade, would himself be overthrown and killed by the usurper Magnentius in 350.
Constantius II: The Survivor
Of the three brothers, only Constantius II, ruler of the East, died still wearing the purple. The Constantius II “Fallen Horseman” follis in the collection — struck at Cyzicus between AD 351 and 354 — captures him at the height of a reign defined almost entirely by war: against Magnentius in the West, against the Sasanian Persians in the East, and eventually against his own cousin Julian, who would be acclaimed Augustus by his troops against Constantius’s wishes in 360. Two further Constantius II issues round out the collection’s holdings of his reign, tracking the same FEL TEMP REPARATIO messaging — “the restoration of happy times” — that the mints kept stamping into bronze even as the happy times grew harder to find. Constantius died of fever in 361, on his way to confront Julian, never quite finishing the war his father’s division of the empire had guaranteed.
Maxentius: The Rival at the Bottom of the Tiber
No account of this dynasty is complete without the man Constantine had to defeat to start it. Maxentius, son of the retired co-emperor Maximian, seized control of Italy and Africa in 306 and held Rome for six years, restoring public buildings and courting the Senate while never being recognized as legitimate by his rivals in the Tetrarchic system. His downfall came at the Milvian Bridge in October 312, where Constantine’s forces broke his army and Maxentius drowned in the Tiber as the bridge collapsed under his retreating troops — the battle Constantine would later credit, depending on which source you trust, to a vision of a cross in the sky. Without Maxentius’s defeat, there is no Christian Constantine, no Edict of Milan, and no quadriga reaching toward the hand of God. His coinage in the collection is a reminder that the dynasty’s entire story pivots on the year he lost.
Reading the Family Tree in Bronze
Taken together, these nine coins do something a textbook genealogy chart can’t: they let you watch the empire’s official religion change in real time, one die at a time, across roughly five decades. Genius gives way to Sol Invictus, Sol Invictus gives way to silence, and silence gives way to a hand descending from heaven. For more on cracking the legends and mint marks on any of these late Roman bronzes — most of them carry the small exergue letters covered in our guide to Roman mint marks — that’s the natural next stop. And if the dynasty’s tangled relationships have you reaching for a chart, the Constantine II and Constans and Constantius II ruler pages lay out exactly who fought whom, and why, in considerably more patience than the brothers themselves ever managed.
A father who held the line. A son who rewrote the rules. A grandson erased before his time. Three brothers who couldn’t share what they’d been given. This is what an empire’s most consequential century looks like when you hold it in your hand, one follis at a time.
