A barbarian father holds out his small child to the seated emperor, and the gesture is the entire argument of the Augustan peace. Struck at Lugdunum in 8 BC, this denarius (RIC I 201a) shows Augustus enthroned on a curule chair atop a low dais, hand extended in calm reception, while a cloaked Gaul or German offers up his son. The scene almost certainly refers to operations on the Rhine frontier conducted by Tiberius and the late Drusus, whose campaigns of the previous years had pushed Roman arms to the Elbe and produced the practice of taking high-status children as hostages, the obsides who guaranteed the good behavior of their fathers' tribes.
Roman viewers would have read the image as clemency and submission braided together: the curule chair signaled magisterial authority, the elevated dais separated Roman order from barbarian supplication, and the child, neither bound nor weeping, became a token of trust extracted under the shadow of the legions. Augustus had closed the doors of Janus, accepted the title pater patriae was now within reach (it would come 6 BC), and was rebuilding his image around paternal reception rather than the bloodied sword of the triumvir. The barbarian hands over a son; Rome, the coin insists, is the household into which he is being received.
- Mint
- Lugdunum
- Struck
- Struck 8 BC
- Authority
- Augustus
- Reverse
- Augustus seated left on a curule chair set on a low dais, extending his hand toward a cloaked Gaul or German standing right and presenting a child held out in both hands toward Augustus