In 11 BC, with the civil wars more than a decade behind him and the Senate increasingly content to address him as something between magistrate and demigod, Augustus had his Lugdunum mint strike a quiet little denarius showing Diana with her spear, her bow, and a hunting dog at her heel. The choice was not idle. Diana was the sister of Apollo, and Apollo, since Actium, had been the divine patron of the Augustan house, the god who (in the regime's preferred telling) had steered the arrows that broke Antony and Cleopatra's fleet.
To pair the princeps's bare, unadorned head, no diadem, no wreath, the studied modesty of a man who insisted he was merely first among citizens, with the huntress on the reverse was to invoke that Actian theology by the side door, through the sister rather than the brother. Lugdunum itself matters here: by 11 BC the Gallic mint was eclipsing Rome as the empire's primary producer of precious-metal coinage, and types like this one, restrained, mythologically literate, designed to travel in the purses of soldiers and traders from the Rhine to the Euphrates, were how the new order spoke to its subjects. A goddess with a hunting dog, on a piece of silver weighing less than four grams, doing the slow work of empire.
- Mint
- Lugdunum
- Struck
- 11 BC
- Authority
- Augustus