A laurel branch, in Roman political grammar, was never just foliage. On the reverse of this anonymous denarius of Augustus (RIC I 165), the *princeps* sits on a curule chair atop a raised tribunal, hand extended in the calm gesture of a magistrate dispensing favor, while a soldier approaches bearing a *parazonium* and offering up the laurel. The scene is loaded: it is the moment a victorious general, or perhaps a returning legionary delegation, hands the symbol of triumph to the man who has made triumphs his personal monopoly. By the 20s BC Augustus had quietly closed the *triumphus* to anyone outside the imperial house, so the laurel no longer flowed from the Senate to its generals but back, always back, to the *princeps* on his dais.
The obverse, his bare head without diadem or wreath, keeps up the republican fiction; the reverse shows who actually receives the spoils of empire. Power, the image insists, is something given freely by grateful soldiers to a seated civilian. Anyone who had served under him knew better.
- Mint
- Unknown
- Struck
- 27 BC-AD 14
- Authority
- Augustus
- Reverse
- shows Augustus seated left on curule chair set on dais, extending hand toward soldier carrying parazonium and presenting laurel branch