The young man on this denarius is not subtle. Struck in the heady years between Actium and the constitutional settlement of 27 BC, when Octavian was still finding the visual grammar that would carry him from warlord to Augustus, this coin shows him fused with Jupiter Terminus, a thunderbolt humming behind his laureate head, while on the reverse he sits on a curule chair holding Victory in his palm like a household pet. Terminus was the god of boundaries who, famously, had refused to yield his place on the Capitoline even to Jupiter himself: a deity of immovability, of lines that do not shift.
To wear his face in the late twenties BC, with the legions paid off and Antony's memory being scrubbed from the East, was to say something quite specific: the new order is fixed, the borders of power have been drawn, and the man who drew them sits with Victory in hand. The legends are blank, and they do not need to be otherwise. The image is the argument.
- Mint
- Uncertain Italian mint
- Struck
- Struck circa 29-27 BC
- Authority
- Augustus
- Reverse
- Augustus seated left on curule chair, holding Victory