Were the words Libertas, Humanitas & Felicitas engraved on Hadrian's coins?

by noblehobbit

I've recently read a book called Memoirs of Hadrian (here), which is a fake autobiography of the emperor.

At some point, the writer claims that the words HUMANITAS, FELICITAS, LIBERTAS were engraved on coins, during Hadrian's reign. I am aware that having roman virtues on coins was not uncommon, but I couldn't verify that exact claim.

All the sources I found mentioning those words are literary reviews of the book itself. example

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Are you aware of any source that could help me confirm (or refute) the writer's claim ?

LegalAction

There are several sources on the internet you can use to check out this sort of thing.

My first stop for this is Mantis at Numismatics.org. That searches that database of the American Numismatics Society in New York. In this case, I set the parameters for Roman coins, issued by Hadrian, between 100 and 150 CE. For the "keyword" field I entered each of your three words independently.

Felicitas got these results.

Libertas got these.

Humanitas got no results. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist; just that it doesn't exist in the ANS collection.

So from there we look for other databases. I next turn to wildwinds.com, which is another reference site for collectors. It is not nearly as easy to use as Mantis, but we can get to Roman Imperial coinage easily enough, and we're looking for coins struck by Hadrian with the "Humanitas" legend. What we get is a list of all the Hadrian-struck coins in the database.

CTRL-F for Humanitas: no hits.

Next, Vcoins.com, an auction site. I have coins bought from here. In the search bar at the top I put "humanitas" and only got a copy of the (very good) Roman Coin Essays presented to Harold Mattingly.

So I turn to the menus. I select Roman coins, Roman imperial coins, and Adoptive Emperors. From there you have to go coin by coin, since each seller might include more or less information in their description. That's a pain the ass I've done for my own research, but I hope you won't mind if I don't do it here.

There are other coin databases out there. The British Museum is supposed to be working with ANS to integrate their catalogs, but I haven't figured out how to navigate that yet.

You may also want to check over at /r/numismatics; they are a very knowledgeable group and know a lot more about the auctions than I do.

EDIT: Oh, check out /r/ancientcoins too! I forgot about the ACSearch.info engine they introduced me to! Still no luck for "Humanitas."