Few diplomatic settlements in Roman history were so thoroughly converted into propaganda as the Parthian accord of 20 BC, and this little silver denarius (RIC I 287, struck at Rome a year or two later by the moneyer Petronius Turpilianus) is one of the smaller, sharper instruments of that conversion. On the reverse a Parthian kneels in the dust, offering up a vexillum marked with the numeral X, the standard of a lost legion handed back to Rome. These were the eagles surrendered by Crassus at Carrhae in 53 BC and by Antony's lieutenants in the 30s, and Augustus had recovered them not by the sword but by patient negotiation with Phraates IV, a fact the Roman mint quietly declined to mention in favor of an image that read as conquest. The choice of Liber, the Italian Bacchus, on the obverse is the curious part: a god associated with the East, with Antony's theatrical self-fashioning as the New Dionysus, here reclaimed and rewreathed in ivy on Augustan silver.
The message is that the East itself, its standards, its gods, its humiliations and its glamour, now belonged to Rome's first citizen. Virgil was finishing the Aeneid in these same months. The coin says in metal what the poem says in hexameter.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- 19/8 BC
- Authority
- Augustus
- Reverse
- Parthian kneeling right in attitude of submission, offering up vexillum marked X and extending hand