At the very end of his life, with the succession finally settled and the empire he had built about to pass to a stepson he never quite trusted, Augustus issued a denarius from the imperial mint at Lugdunum that quietly said the loudest thing imaginable: peace was a woman, and the woman was Livia. The reverse shows her seated, holding scepter and olive branch in the guise of Pax, while the obverse carries the laureate head of the princeps himself, no legend needed because by AD 13 no Roman holding this coin needed to ask whose face it was. The pairing is the message. Livia had been Augustus's wife for more than half a century by the time this type was struck, and the regime had spent decades cultivating her as the model Roman matron, weaver of the emperor's tunics, mother of the heir apparent Tiberius.
To dress her as Pax on the silver of the realm was to fuse the dynastic and the ideological: the peace of the Augustan settlement and the woman who would, within months of this issue, become the widow charged with managing its transmission. Tacitus would later insinuate that she managed rather more than that, hurrying her husband toward the grave so Tiberius could inherit unopposed. The coin does not know any of this. It shows a serene goddess with an olive branch, and lets the reader of the next two thousand years decide what serenity costs.
- Mint
- Lugdunum
- Struck
- AD 13-14
- Authority
- Augustus