No legend, no name, no title: just Victory on a prow and a man in a parade chariot, and every Roman who handled this denarius in 28 BC knew exactly who he was. Octavian had returned from Actium and Alexandria in the summer of 29 to celebrate a triple triumph, three days of processions for Illyricum, Actium, and Egypt, and this coin (RIC I 264, struck at some still unidentified Italian mint in the years immediately after) is the numismatic echo of those days. The Victory on a ship's prow is the Actian Victory, the goddess who had stood behind Agrippa's rams as Antony's fleet broke; the slow quadriga on the reverse is the triumphal car itself, branch in hand, reins gathered, the victor processing through a city that had not seen a triumph on this scale in a generation. What the type does not say is as telling as what it shows.
There is no IMP CAESAR, no DIVI F, no legend at all, because in 28 BC the man in the chariot did not yet have the vocabulary to describe what he was becoming. The settlement of January 27 would give him the name Augustus and a constitutional fiction to live inside. This coin belongs to the brief window before that, when a young warlord with no rivals left was still working out how to be called something other than a king.
- Mint
- Uncertain Italian mint
- Struck
- circa 29-27 BC
- Authority
- Augustus
- Reverse
- Augustus standing in ornamented slow quadriga right, holding branch and reins