A bull lowers its horns and charges, tail snapping behind it, and beneath its hooves Augustus has stamped a number: IMP X, his tenth imperatorial acclamation. This denarius, struck at Lugdunum in 15 BC (RIC I 169), belongs to the moment when the princeps was reorganizing the western half of his empire from a new Gallic capital, and the bull is doing more than decorative work. The image looks back to the coinage of Thurium and to a long Greek tradition of butting bulls as emblems of raw civic vigor, but in Augustus's hands it reads as the brute, fertile power of the state itself, head down and moving forward.
The tenth acclamation likely commemorates the Alpine campaigns of his stepsons Tiberius and Drusus, who that very year were subduing the Raeti and Vindelici and opening the road from Italy to the Rhine. Lugdunum had just been raised to the status of imperial mint, and its silver was about to flow north with the legions. The bare head on the obverse, no wreath, no diadem, is the studied modesty of a man who had refused kingship and accepted everything else; the bull on the reverse says what the portrait will not.
- Mint
- Lugdunum
- Struck
- Struck 15 BC
- Authority
- Augustus