Roman AE Ulpia Severina (AD 270-275) NGC

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Coins in images are examples only.

Little is definitively known about this Roman Empress, wife of the Emperor Aurelian, although she seems to have descended in some way from the Emperor Trajan. Aside from a brief listing in the Historia Augusta, there are no literary sources in which she is discussed at length. There is some numismatic evidence that she continued to reign in her own right after the death of her husband in 275, which would make her the only woman to have ruled over the entire Empire alone.

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Coins in images are examples only.

Ulpia Severina was Roman empress as the wife of Roman emperor Aurelian from c. 270 to 275. Severina is unmentioned in surviving literary sources and known only from coinage and inscriptions, and as a result, very little is known about her. Her nomen Ulpia suggests that she may have been related either to Emperor Trajan (r. 98–117) or the usurper Laelianus (r. 269), as they share the same nomen, and perhaps from Dacia, where the name was common. It is not known when she married Aurelian, but it might have been before he became emperor. She was probably proclaimed Augusta in the autumn of 274.

Aurelian was murdered in September/October 275 and his successor, Tacitus, was proclaimed emperor only after a brief interregnum, lasting somewhere between five and eleven weeks. Though coins of Severina were minted under Aurelian from 274 to 275, some historians speculatively assign certain unusual types of coins to this brief interregnum period and suggest that Severina either effectively briefly ruled the empire in her own right, or that there was confusion in regards to Aurelian's successor until Tacitus became emperor, and coin mints thus chose to mint coins in Severina's name. Given that no literary source discusses Severina, any interpretation of the unusual coins remains speculation.