Twenty years after Actium, Augustus was still cashing the dividend. This Lugdunum denarius of 11 BC, RIC I 180, places his bare head on the obverse and on the reverse sets Apollo Citharoedus, the long-robed singer god, holding plectrum and lyre with the abbreviation ACT in the exergue: Apollo of Actium, the deity who had presided over the naval victory in 31 BC that ended the civil wars and made Octavian into Augustus. The reverse legend IMP XII counts his imperatorial acclamations, a quiet ledger of military prestige rolled forward year by year.
The choice of Apollo as singer rather than archer is the point. By 11 BC Augustus had no need to advertise the spear and the burning ship; he wanted the cithara, the lyre of order restored, the god of measured song presiding over a world that had stopped fighting itself. Lugdunum, the great mint of the Three Gauls, was by this date the principal supplier of imperial silver to the western armies, and every legionary who fingered this coin in his pay was being told the same thing: the man whose head was on the metal had won at sea, and the god who had helped him win was now playing music.
- Mint
- Lugdunum
- Struck
- Struck 11 BC
- Authority
- Augustus
- Reverse
- shows Apollo Citharoedus of Actium wearing long drapery, standing facing with head left, holding plectrum in right hand and lyre in left