THE TETRICI AND THE DOWNFALL OF THE GALLIC EMPIRE

Victorinus was killed at Cologne on the Rhine by a group of disaffected officers whose wives he had allegedly seduced or tried to seduce. Significantly, this does not seem to have been a political plot with the intention of replacing Victorinus with another emperor but rather an act of revenge by one Attitianus and his comrades. Thus, there was no obvious successor waiting in the wings and the result could have been another Civil War.

That does not seem to have happened. One man, the general Domitianus, attempted to take control of Cologne but his authority was so fleeting that only three of his coins are known. All are radiates; the first, found at Cleons in France in the late nineteenth century was dismissed by some as a fake until a second example – struck from the same pair of dies – was found in the Chalgrove (Oxfordshire) hoard in 2003 (figure 1). Since then, a third example has turned up in Bulgaria. We know practically nothing about Domitianus, not even his full tria nomina. Domitianus’ coins were struck at Mint II, attributed to Cologne, and the man who engraved the obverse die used to strike them knew what his emperor looked like; the bust is the likeness of an individual and not a replication of Victorinus’ features. Clearly, Domitianus