Here is a coin that lies about its own date. The diademed head on the obverse belongs to Philip I Philadelphos, the Seleukid king who died in 75 BC, and the seated Zeus Nikephoros on the reverse continues a Seleukid type that had been familiar across Syria for generations. But the small ΛΛ in the exergue is a Caesarean Era date, year 36, which fixes the strike to 14/3 BC, deep into the reign of Augustus and more than half a century after Philip's bones had cooled.
Antioch under its new Roman master kept hammering out tetradrachms in the comfortable old idiom, dead king and all, because the silver of the Levant ran on habit and trust: merchants from Palmyra to the Phoenician coast knew what a Philip tetradrachm weighed and what its Zeus looked like, and Augustus had the political sense not to disturb them. The princeps who rebuilt Roman coinage in his own image at Lugdunum and Rome was content, on the Orontes, to let a long dead Seleukid keep his diadem and do the work. Empire, here, is not the face on the coin but the monogram beside the throne.
- Mint
- Antioch
- Struck
- 27 BC-AD 14; year 36 of the Caesarean Era (14/3 BC)
- Authority
- Augustus
- Reverse
- Zeus Nikephoros seated left with monogram to inner left and below throne, all within wreath