Here is the new monarchy in miniature, scaled to fit in a soldier's palm. Struck at Lugdunum in 15 BC, this denarius (RIC I 165a) shows on its reverse what no coin of the free Republic would have dared: Augustus enthroned on a curule chair atop a raised dais, calmly receiving laurel branches from two soldiers who approach with their parazonia at their sides. The composition is a careful piece of theatre. The men come bearing the symbols of victory, but the victories are his, and the *sella curulis* he occupies (once shared, by rotation, among consuls and praetors) has become a throne in everything but name.
The bare head on the obverse keeps up the old fiction of *princeps inter pares*, a citizen among citizens, while the reverse quietly tells the truth. Lugdunum had only recently become the empire's principal western mint, and its output was aimed squarely at the Rhine and Danube armies whose loyalty kept the system upright. A soldier paid in these coins was being shown, every time he counted his stipendium, the precise choreography of the new order: the legions bring laurels, and one man, seated, accepts them.
- Mint
- Lugdunum
- Struck
- Struck 15 BC
- Authority
- Augustus
- Reverse
- Augustus seated left on a curule chair set on a dais, extending his hand toward two soldiers, each carrying a parazonium and presenting laurel branches