The Greek East did not stop minting Greek coins just because a Roman now ran the world. This Antiochene tetradrachm of 5 BC, struck a generation into Augustus's sole rule, shows him bare-headed in profile, the unembellished portrait of a citizen rather than the laurelled god-king the Hellenistic kingdoms had taught Syria to expect. Yet flip the coin and the Seleucid past stares back: Zeus enthroned, Nike in his outstretched hand, scepter in the other, the exact composition that Seleucus I and his heirs had stamped onto silver from this same mint for two and a half centuries. The exergue reads ΦΕ, year 25 of the Actian era, counting forward from the day in 31 BC when Octavian's fleet broke Antony and Cleopatra at the Greek headland and inherited the Roman East.
The monograms beside head and god are those of the local civic authorities, who continued to do what they had always done, on the weight standard they had always used, in the iconographic vocabulary their grandfathers would have recognized. Rome's genius in the provinces was rarely the imposition of Roman things. It was the quiet substitution of the emperor's face for the king's, while everything else, the Zeus, the Nike, the Greek silver, the local count of years, kept turning as before.
- Mint
- Antioch
- Struck
- 5 BC
- Authority
- Augustus
- Reverse
- Zeus seated left on throne holding Nike and scepter with monograms