Diana striding across the reverse of a Lugdunum denarius, bow in hand and reaching for an arrow, is not the goddess of moonlight and maidens that later poets liked to imagine. She is the huntress as Augustus wanted her seen in 10 BC: lethal, in motion, a divine archer with a target in mind. The coin (RIC I 197a) belongs to the great silver output of Lugdunum, the mint Augustus had effectively nationalized for imperial coinage, and its laureate portrait is the standard face of the Augustan settlement at its most secure, a princeps two decades past Actium and increasingly comfortable being shown wreathed like a victor on every payday across the western provinces. Diana's presence here is not random piety.
Augustus claimed her as one of the patron deities of Actium, where a temple to Apollo and his sister overlooked the bay in which Antony's fleet had died, and her appearance on coinage struck for legionaries in Gaul quietly reminded them whose arrows had decided whose Rome they now served. The huntress does not pose. She is drawing.
- Mint
- Lugdunum
- Struck
- Struck 10 BC
- Authority
- Augustus