In the spring of 20 BC, Augustus pulled off a piece of theater that Romans had been waiting a generation to see: he installed a client king in Armenia and recovered the legionary standards Crassus had lost at Carrhae, all without a pitched battle. This denarius, struck at Pergamum a year or two later and catalogued as RIC 519, is the eastern half of that propaganda campaign in silver. The obverse offers Augustus bare-headed, the unadorned image of a citizen-magistrate rather than a Hellenistic monarch, while the reverse delivers the message: an Armenian, identifiable by his trousers and tall cap, stands holding a spear with his hand resting on a bow. He is not chained, not kneeling, not trampled. He simply stands, armed, in the posture of a subject who has been allowed to keep his weapons because Rome has decided he may.
That restraint is the point. Where a Republican moneyer would have shown a captive bound beneath a trophy, Augustus shows submission as a settled fact, the kind that needs no shouting. Parthia had handed back the eagles, Tiberius had marched a young Tigranes onto the Armenian throne, and the East was, for the moment, a problem solved by diplomacy dressed as conquest. Virgil was writing the *Aeneid* in these same years; the coin and the poem are doing similar work.
- Mint
- Pergamum
- Struck
- ca. 19-18 B.C.
- Authority
- Augustus
- Reverse
- Armenian standing facing, holding spear and resting hand upon bow