AE Follis AE3, A.D. 378-383, Antioch, 18.4mm, 2.51g, 180°, RIC IX (45b).
Obv: D N VALENTINIANVS P F AVG. Pearl-diademed, draped and cuirassed bust right.
Rev: CONCORDIA AVGGG. Roma seated, head left, holding globe and spear; Θ, Φ and K in field, ANTS in ex.
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Flavius Valentinianus, commonly known as Valentinian II, was Roman Emperor of the west from 375 to 392. He was born to Emperor Valentinian I and his second wife, Justina. He was the half-brother of Valentinian’s other son, Gratian, who had shared the imperial title with his father since 367. The elder Valentinian died on campaign in Pannonia in 375. Neither Gratian (then in Trier) nor his uncle Valens (emperor for the East) were consulted by the army commanders on the scene. Instead of merely acknowledging Gratian as his father’s successor, Valentinian I’s generals acclaimed the four-year old boy augustus on 22 November 375. In 378, the Emperor Valens, was killed in battle and Gratian invited the general Theodosius to be emperor in the East.

Valentinian himself seems to have exercised no real authority, and was a figurehead for various powerful interests: his mother, his co-emperors, and powerful generals. Since the Crisis of the Third Century, powerful generals had largely ruled the empire, a situation formalized by Diocletian and his collegiate system. While Constantine and his sons had been strong military figures, they had also re-established the practice of hereditary succession, adopted by Valentinian I. The obvious flaw in these two competing requirements came in the reign of Valentinian II, a child. His reign was a harbinger of the fifth century, when the empire was almost completely controlled by powerful generals and other officials.

On 15 May 392, Valentinian was found hanged in his residence in Vienne. Theodosius' trusted general Arbogast maintained that the emperor’s death was suicide. While our main source, Zosimus writing in the early sixth century from Constantinople, states that the Arbogast had Valentinian murdered. Other contemporary sources are divided in their opinion. The young man’s body was conveyed in ceremony to Milan and laid in a porphyry sarcophagus next to his brother Gratian, most probably in the Chapel of Sant'Aquilino attached to San Lorenzo.