An elephant biga is not a vehicle anyone in Rome had ever actually seen on the streets, and that is exactly the point. Struck at Rome in 19 or 18 BC under the moneyer Petronius Turpilianus, this denarius (RIC I 281) gives us Feronia, the old Italic goddess of freedmen and the wild groves of Mount Soracte, on the obverse, diademed and draped like a queen out of a Hellenistic court. On the reverse Augustus rides a chariot drawn by four elephants, laurel in one hand, scepter in the other, an honor that in living memory had belonged to triumphators in painted terracotta atop temple roofs and, more provocatively, to the deified Julius Caesar himself. By the late 20s BC Augustus was past the messy work of winning the civil wars and deep into the harder work of making the result feel ancient and inevitable.
Pairing himself with Feronia, a goddess whose sanctuary at Terracina was where slaves were manumitted into Roman citizenship, advertised the princeps as the source of liberty rather than its undertaker, while the elephant car quietly placed him in the iconographic register of gods and the divine dead. He was, after all, *divi filius*. The chariot was waiting.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- 19/8 BC
- Authority
- Augustus
- Reverse
- Augustus standing in biga of elephants advancing left, holding laurel branch and scepter