Antioch in 5 BC was a Greek city wearing Roman clothes, and this tetradrachm shows exactly how the tailoring worked. The reverse keeps the civic image Antiochenes had loved for nearly three centuries: Tyche of Antioch enthroned on her rocky perch, the river-god Orontes surfacing at her feet, a composition descended from the bronze original by Eutychides of Sicyon commissioned shortly after Seleucus I founded the city. What has changed is everything around her. The legend reads NIKES, "of Victory," and the date is given in the Actian era, counting from the sea fight off western Greece in 31 BC where Octavian broke Antony and Cleopatra and inherited the East.
Year 26 of that reckoning coincides with Augustus's twelfth consulship, the year he led his grandson Gaius into the Forum and presented him to the Roman people. So the obverse offers the laureate princeps in profile, and the reverse offers the city's own goddess holding a palm frond she did not used to hold, recast as the Tyche of an Actian world. Antioch had not stopped being itself; it had simply learned to date its luck from someone else's battle.
- Mint
- Antioch
- Struck
- 27 BC-AD 14, dated year 26 of the Actian Era and Cos. XII (5 BC)
- Authority
- Augustus
- Reverse
- Tyche seated right on rocky outcropping holding palm frond; below, half-length figure of river-god Orontes swimming right; monogram and consular date in right field