Inside the little round temple on the reverse of this denarius sits a legionary eagle, and that eagle is the whole point. In 53 BC Crassus had marched seven legions into the Parthian desert and lost them, along with their standards, at Carrhae; the aquilae passed into enemy hands and stayed there for a generation, a wound in Roman pride that Caesar had planned to avenge before the Ides intervened. Augustus, characteristically, recovered them in 20 BC by negotiation rather than war, and then sold the diplomatic settlement to the Roman public as a triumph.
This coin, struck around 18 BC at an uncertain Spanish mint and inscribed simply S P Q R, is part of that sales campaign: the temple is a provisional shrine to Mars Ultor (Mars the Avenger) housing the returned standards, the quadriga atop it borrowed from the language of triumph, the senate and people invoked in the exergue as the proper owners of the recovered eagles. The grand Mars Ultor temple in the Forum of Augustus would not be dedicated until 2 BC, two decades later, so what we see here is the idea of the monument running ahead of the masonry, propaganda cast in silver while the marble was still being quarried.
- Mint
- Uncertain Spanish mint
- Struck
- circa 18 BC
- Authority
- Augustus
- Reverse
- Temple of Mars Ultor, round-domed tetrastyle temple on podium of three steps with chariot carrying an aquila and miniature galloping quadriga right