Anonymous, circa 4th century. Seal (Bronze, 16 mm, 4.29 g, 12 h). Laureate male head to right. Rev. Bare-headed and bearded head to right. Unpublished in the standard references. An intriguing Roman imperial seal. Struck on a slightly short flan, otherwise, good very fine.


The portrait on the obverse of this seal is clearly wearing a laurel wreath. However, there are some problems with his identification. If the bare-headed and bearded portrait on the reverse are imperial, he must be a deified emperor, which leads to a tempting identification of the dual portraits as the emperor Caracalla and the deified Septimius Severus. However, all known seals from this period are of different style, and they are somewhat larger in module. Moreover, our seal, produced with freely applied dies, is typical of the 4th century. A second hypothesis then is that a 4th century emperor is portrayed on the obverse, with a Roman official, possibly a praetorian prefect, on the reverse.