AE4 — Constantine I (posthumous) — Nicomedia — Quadriga

Obverse: DV CONSTANTI-NVS PT AVGG, veiled bust of the deified Constantine the Great right

Reverse: Constantine veiled, riding in a quadriga to right, the hand of God reaching down to receive him, SMNS in exergue

Mass: 1.80 g

Diameter: 16 mm

Mint Info: Nicomedia, 337–340 AD

Catalogues: RIC VIII Nicomedia 18

This small bronze belongs to the posthumous "Ascension" or "Veiled Constantine" series struck across the empire in the years immediately following Constantine the Great's death in May 337 AD. The obverse presents the deceased emperor veiled, marking his status as divus, "the deified," following his consecration by the Senate in the tradition of earlier apotheosized emperors. The reverse dramatizes that consecration directly: Constantine, still veiled, rides a quadriga heavenward while the hand of God reaches down from above to draw him up, a striking and deliberately Christianized reworking of the older pagan apotheosis imagery, replacing the eagle that had traditionally borne emperors to the gods with an explicit gesture of the Christian deity. The mintmark SMNS identifies the piece as a product of the Nicomedia mint.

Constantine's death triggered a brief but ideologically significant commemorative coinage minted jointly in his honor by his surviving sons before their formal division of the empire, and this type stands as one of the clearest numismatic statements of the new Christian character Constantine had brought to imperial ideology, fusing the old Roman language of deification with an unmistakably biblical image of ascension.