The coin is a piece of monumental architecture in miniature, and the message is written in five letters: RECVPER, recovered. In 53 BC at Carrhae, Crassus had thrown away seven legions and their eagles to the Parthians, and for a generation the standards sat in enemy temples as a standing rebuke to Roman arms. Augustus did not retrieve them by fighting. He retrieved them by negotiation in 20 BC, leaning on Tiberius and the threat of an Armenian campaign, and then he sold the diplomatic settlement to Rome as a victory worthy of Mars himself.
This denarius from a Spanish mint, struck within two or three years of the handover, shows the triumphal arch the Senate voted for the occasion: a quadriga riding the central span, and in the flanking bays two Parthians (or Romans receiving from Parthians, the scholarship is not unanimous) presenting back the *signum* and the *aquila* that Crassus had lost. The bare head on the obverse is deliberately unadorned, no laurel, no diadem, the *princeps* as citizen. The reverse is where the politics lives. An entire generation's humiliation, repackaged as a building, repackaged again as silver small enough to spend on bread: this is what it looks like when a regime learns to convert grievance into legitimacy.
- Mint
- Uncertain Spanish mint
- Struck
- Struck 18-17 BC
- Authority
- Augustus