A bull lowers its head and charges across the reverse of this Lugdunum denarius, foreleg raised, tail whipping behind it: pure muscular violence rendered in silver. The obverse offers Augustus bareheaded, no laurel, no diadem, just the citizen-princeps confronting the viewer in unadorned profile. The legend IMP XII anchors the moment to 11 BC, when Augustus had accumulated his twelfth imperatorial acclamation, most recently from the German campaigns of Drusus and Tiberius beyond the Rhine. The bull is not random pastoral decoration.
It is the standard type of the Lugdunum mint in this period, almost certainly evoking the foundation legend of the colony and perhaps the zodiacal Taurus under which Caesar had founded it, but it also reads as raw aggression, the natural emblem of an empire whose armies were pushing into Germania and the Alps in the same years. Lugdunum had only recently become the principal western mint, displacing the Spanish issues, and these bull denarii poured out by the thousand to pay the legions doing the work the reverse advertises. The princeps shows you his face. The bull shows you what the face commands.
- Mint
- Lugdunum
- Struck
- Struck 11 BC
- Authority
- Augustus