Inside this little round temple sits the reason Augustus could sleep at night: the legionary eagles he had wrenched back from Parthia in 20 BC, the same standards lost by Crassus at Carrhae in 53 and by Antony's lieutenants in the 30s. The denarius, struck around 18 BC at an uncertain Spanish mint (RIC I 119), shows a tetrastyle shrine to Mars Ultor, Mars the Avenger, with a quadriga bearing an aquila enthroned within and SPQR flanking the field, the Senate and People given pride of place on the reverse while the laureate princeps occupies the obverse. The recovery had been a diplomatic transaction, not a battlefield triumph, but Augustus marketed it as a vengeance two generations overdue and the Senate played along, voting honors, an arch, and eventually the great temple of Mars Ultor in the Forum of Augustus that would not actually be dedicated until 2 BC.
What the coin depicts, then, is not that later marble colossus but a smaller provisional shrine on the Capitol, built to house the standards while the grander project rose. The message is compact and exact: Rome's humiliation has been wiped clean, the eagles are home, and the man who brought them back wears the laurel while the SPQR keeps its dignified place across the field. A generation after Carrhae, the account had been settled with ink rather than blood, and Augustus had learned that for most purposes ink was enough.
- Mint
- Uncertain Spanish mint
- Struck
- circa 18 BC
- Authority
- Augustus
- Reverse
- temple of Mars Ultor, round-domed tetrastyle structure on podium of three steps, with chariot carrying an aquila and miniature galloping quadriga right within the temple