Here is the dynasty Augustus thought he had secured, pressed into silver and shipped out of Lugdunum by the cartload: two young men, two shields, two spears, and the priestly simpulum and lituus floating above their heads like a blessing. The coin is a denarius of the so-called Gaius and Lucius type (RIC I 211), struck from 2 BC onward at the imperial mint at Lyon, which by this date was producing the bulk of Rome's silver. Augustus had adopted his grandsons, the sons of Agrippa and Julia, as his own; the Senate and people had named them principes iuventutis, princes of the youth, and voted them the shields and spears that the reverse so carefully displays. The priestly implements signal that both boys had been enrolled in the great colleges, augur and pontifex, while still in their teens. This was not subtle messaging.
It was a succession plan in your purse, distributed across the empire in tens of millions of pieces, declaring that the Augustan settlement had a future because it had heirs. Lucius died at Massilia in AD 2. Gaius died of a wound in Lycia in AD 4. The mint kept striking the type for years afterward, which is why these coins are among the commonest denarii of the entire reign: a portrait of a dynasty that had already ceased to exist, paying the legions of a princeps who would, in the end, have to settle for Tiberius.
- Mint
- Lugdunum
- Struck
- Struck 2 BC-AD 12
- Authority
- Augustus
- Reverse
- Caius and Lucius Caesars standing facing with two shields and two spears between them; simpulum above on left and lituus above on right