A trophy of captured weapons, on a coin struck in the new colony where the war's veterans were settling down: this denarius from Emerita is the Cantabrian War in miniature. Augustus had gone to Spain in person in 26 BC to finish what Rome had been failing to finish for two centuries, the subjugation of the mountain peoples of the north. He fell ill at Tarraco, handed the campaign to his legates, and let them grind the Cantabri and Astures down through 25 BC. Publius Carisius, propraetorian legate of Lusitania and the man whose name fills the reverse (P CARISIVS LEG PRO PR), took the Astures and founded Emerita Augusta, modern Mérida, as a colony for time-served legionaries of the V Alaudae and X Gemina. The reverse displays their spoils with an ethnographer's precision: the round Celtiberian *caetra* with its iron boss, the spear, and the *machaera*, the curved falcata whose lethal forward weight Roman writers grudgingly admired, here shown with its hilt secured by a bar in the manner of surrendered arms.
This was the iconography of a war already declared won. It was not. The Cantabri rose again in 22 BC, and again in 19, and Agrippa had to be sent to crush them properly with methods that approached extermination. The denarius preserves the moment when Augustus thought he could put the shield down.
- Mint
- Emerita
- Struck
- circa 25-23 BC
- Authority
- Augustus
- Reverse
- round shield with central boss within octagon and studs; above, spear-head with short shaft right; below, machaera (curved sword) with hilt closed by a bar