In the Antonine period the vast majority of Roman provincial coins had inscriptions in Greek, but Roman coloniae and municipia used Latin to emphasize their Roman identities.
Except in the case of pseudo-autonomous coins, the obverse inscription normally gives the titles and name (usually in the nominative case) of the emperor or member of the imperial family depicted.
The reverse inscription usually includes an ‘ethnic’ (an explicit reference to the people in whose name the coin was produced) in the genitive case. The reverse inscription may also contain one or more additional elements, of which the most common are civic titles (for example, ‘neocorates’ — wardenships of the imperial cult) and civic epithets, the names of local festivals, explanations of the designs, dates in the form of regnal years or local eras, the name and title of a ‘magistrate’, and marks of value
You can search the database for Greek and Latin obverse and reverse inscriptions by using the “Identification search” or the “Advanced search”. Latin characters can be input directly into the search fields whereas for Ancient Greek a virtual keyboard has been provided. Please note that, by default, the searches ignore spaces.
Magistrates
The names and titles of individuals, who are sometimes explicitly magistrates, appear on the reverses of some coins from Thrace, Moesia Inferior, and Asia Minor. The function of the names of individuals on coins has proved difficult to define: are they there to date the coins or to record responsibility for the minting of the coins (which might include paying for issues)? In a small minority of cases particular formulae record responsibility, sometimes embracing initiative or financial generosity on the part of the individual named, but in the vast majority of cases both possibilities are left open. The function of the majority of names on coins may perhaps best be viewed as traditional dating by means of eponymous magistracy, but in a very flexible system in which the choice of the ‘eponymous’ magistrate to date the coins tended to be correlated with responsibility for the coin being dated.
Further Reading: P. Weiss in Howgego, Heuchert, and Burnett 2005
It is possible to search the database for magistrates’ names and titles by using the “Advanced search” section “Magistrate”.