The trophy on the reverse of this Antioch denarius is not Armenian armor in the usual sense: a tiara, a bow case, a quiver, the kit of a Parthian-style cavalryman, arranged like spoils stripped from a defeated king. ARMENIA CAPTA, reads the legend, captured, conquered, taken. Except that nothing of the kind had happened. In 20 BC Augustus did not march on Armenia; his stepson Tiberius did, at the head of an army, and what he found there was a country already prepared to receive Rome's preferred candidate, Tigranes III, after the murder of the pro-Parthian Artaxias by his own court.
The diplomacy was choreographed, the bloodshed minimal, and the same season delivered the far greater prize that Augustus had been working toward for years: the return, by negotiated handover, of the legionary standards lost by Crassus at Carrhae in 53 BC and by Antony in 36. The princeps had recovered Roman honor without fighting a war, and the coinage struck across the empire, at Rome, in Spain, and here at Antioch, transmuted a settlement into a conquest. CAPTA is the verb of Caesar in Gaul and of the Flavians in Judaea; to apply it to a kingdom that had effectively invited Rome in was a choice, and the choice tells you what kind of regime Augustus was building. The bare head on the obverse, no wreath, no diadem, no divine attributes, completes the trick: the man who has just been styled conqueror of the East declines, on the same piece of silver, to look like a king.
- Mint
- Antioch
- Struck
- ca. 19-18 B.C.
- Authority
- Augustus
- Reverse
- shows tiara on left with bow case and quiver on right, commemorating the capture of Armenia