This coin sold on eBay a few weeks ago - I was waiting in case the buyer (not me) might post it someplace.
What's cool here is that the engraver has shown the whole chariot, in 3-D perspective, that Constantine is standing on. Typically all we get is a single wheel to hint at the chariot (or perhaps a segway
), but here we've got the far wheel as well as the near one, the sloping edges of the chariot and a hint of the platform he is standing on.
Here's an Etruscan chariot in the NY Met museum to give a better idea of what we're looking at.
And here's a mosaic in Barcelona's archeological museum that seems to show that the wheels sometimes really were as small as shown on the coin. Must have been a bumpy ride!
