Pegasus is an unusual companion for the man who had spent the previous decade rebranding himself as the sober restorer of the Republic, and that is precisely why this denarius rewards a second look. Struck at Rome in 19 or 18 BC under the moneyer P. Petronius Turpilianus (the issue is anonymous on the flan, with no legends preserved on either side), it pairs the bare, unadorned head of Augustus, no wreath, no laurels, no titulature, with the winged horse of Bellerophon stepping out across the reverse.
The bareness of the portrait is the point: in the years immediately following the constitutional settlements of 27 and 23 BC, Augustus was performing modesty as policy, the *princeps* who had handed the Republic back and then quietly kept the keys. Pegasus, meanwhile, belonged to a small repertoire of mythological types Turpilianus revived from older Republican coinage, and scholars have read him variously as a symbol of poetic inspiration (the Hippocrene spring), of apotheosis, or simply of the antiquarian moneyer's taste for archaizing imagery. Whatever Turpilianus intended, the effect is a coin that whispers rather than shouts, an emperor who needs no diadem because everyone already knows whose face this is.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- 19-18 BC
- Authority
- Augustus