Long Table 269. Tracing the Prize Table: The Early History of Imperial and Provincial Agonistic Coins

April 10, 2026
1:00 PM ET

Agonistic coins, a category of civic coinage featuring festival-themed legends and iconography, were predominantly minted by Greek cities in the third century CE. In this Long Table, Tianqi Zhu (University of Cincinnati) presents his original research from the 2025 ANS Summer Seminar to shed light on the often-neglected early development of agonistic coins before their third century explosion. Tracing the origin of the prize table, the most frequent image on later agonistic coins, shows that agonistic coins arose from a complex and continuous interaction between provincial and imperial coinage beginning in the second half of the first century BC, and had been developing for two hundred years before the supposed turning point under Commodus.