Bilingual coins of Severus Alexander in the Eastern provinces

This article considers different categories of bilingual coins of Severus Alex- ander on the basis of their meaning and function. It focuses in particular on issues showing the deliberate use of bilingual legends, but only on a very lim- ited part of an otherwise entirely monolingual civic coinage. Two case studies are examined in detail. The first considers coins of Nicaea in Bithynia, which circulated on a large scale also outside Asia Minor, and especially in Moesia Superior, Dacia and Pannonia; the second presents some hitherto unknown bilingual issues from Nicopolis ad Istrum, in Moesia Inferior. The analysis of analogies and discrepancies between them offers the opportunity to discuss the function of these coins and to suggest a possible interpretation for the economic and cultural context in which they were produced.