A star and a crescent on a Roman denarius look at first like borrowings from somewhere further east, the sort of celestial shorthand you would expect on a coin of a Seleucid king or a Pontic dynast. On a silver piece struck at Rome around 19 or 18 BC under Augustus, with the *princeps* himself bare-headed and unlabelled on the obverse, the meaning is more carefully calculated. The six-rayed star is almost certainly the *sidus Iulium*, the comet that blazed over Rome during the funeral games for Julius Caesar in 44 BC and that the young Octavian had successfully sold to the Roman public as the soul of his adoptive father ascending to join the gods. By the late teens BC, Augustus had been *Augustus* for over a decade, the constitutional settlement of 27 was bedded in, and the *ludi saeculares* of 17 BC were either imminent or freshly past: a regime busy stitching itself into the cosmic order.
The crescent broadens the claim, pairing the deified Julius with the lunar half of the heavens and turning the reverse into a small map of celestial legitimacy. No legend is needed because no Roman handling the coin needed to be told whose star it was. That is the quiet confidence of the mature Augustan coinage: the divinity of the father, and by clear implication the standing of the son, is now simply a fact about the sky.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- 19/8 BC
- Authority
- Augustus