Antioch on the Orontes had been minting Tyche on her rock since the city's Seleucid foundation, and in 2 BC she sat there still, palm frond in hand, the river-god swimming at her feet. What had changed was the head on the other side. This Antiochene tetradrachm (McAlee 183) is dated by the Actian Era, ETOUS ΘΚΚ, year 29, counted from the sea fight off western Greece that ended the Republic, and by Augustus's thirteenth consulship, an office he took up that year for the specific purpose of presenting his grandson Gaius to the Roman people.
The legend NIKH, victory, does double duty: it commemorates Actium, the hinge on which the whole reckoning turns, and it salutes the regime that victory produced. Antioch's civic goddess keeps her seat, her river keeps flowing, but the calendar now runs from a Roman naval engagement and the silver is struck in the name of a princeps in Rome who has just made his grandson the heir apparent. The Hellenistic east had not been conquered so much as rephrased.
- Mint
- Antioch
- Struck
- 27 BC-AD 14, dated year 29 of the Actian Era and Cos. XIII (2 BC)
- Authority
- Augustus
- Reverse
- shows Tyche seated right on rocky outcropping holding palm frond, with half-length figure of river-god Orontes swimming right below, monogram and consular date in right field