A bull, head down and tail snapping like a whip, charges across the reverse of this Lugdunum denarius struck in 10 BC: a deceptively simple image that has launched a small library of scholarly argument. The most economical reading ties the animal to Augustus's twelfth imperatorial acclamation (IMP XII in the exergue), commemorating the German campaigns then being prosecuted by his stepsons Drusus and Tiberius along the Rhine and the Danube. But the bull on Roman silver is rarely just a bull. Some have read it as a sacrificial victim, the kind led to the altar after a triumph; others as a Dionysiac or Apolline emblem; others still as a quiet visual quotation of the famous bull of Thurium or of Caesar's own taurine types, lending the young Princeps a pedigree in beasts as well as in blood.
What is not in dispute is the moment. By 10 BC Augustus had been the master of the Roman world for two decades, the laureate head on the obverse no longer the tense profile of the Triumvir but the settled face of an order that had, against every reasonable expectation, held. The Lugdunum mint, opened by Augustus a few years earlier, was now turning out the precious-metal coinage for the whole western empire from a city deep in pacified Gaul: the bull lowers its horns, and the frontier has moved north.
- Mint
- Lugdunum
- Struck
- 10 BC
- Authority
- Augustus