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Pax Julia — modern Beja in southern Portugal — was granted colonial status by Augustus, and this bronze issue belongs to a brief window of provincially-authorized civic coinage that Augustus permitted in certain Iberian cities during the early principate. The city's coins were struck under local magistrates whose names sometimes appear in the legends, offering one of the few surviving records of municipal administration in Lusitania at this period.

RPC I 53 is among the scarcer civic bronzes from the western provinces.