Augustus rides a chariot drawn by elephants, and the message is unmissable: this is the iconography of apotheosis, the vehicle of a god, deployed by a man still very much alive. Struck at Rome in 19 BC, this denarius (RIC I 301) pairs a martial Virtus on the obverse, helmeted and draped like a goddess of disciplined courage, with a reverse on which the *princeps* drives a *biga* of elephants leftward, laurel branch in one hand and scepter in the other. The year matters. 19 BC was the season of the Parthian settlement, when the standards lost by Crassus at Carrhae were finally returned without a battle being fought, and Augustus was negotiating the terms on which Rome would accept a permanent first citizen who was not, technically, a king.
The elephant chariot was the visual shorthand for divinity, used for Julius Caesar after his consecration and reaching back to Hellenistic processions of Dionysus and Alexander. To put a living Augustus in that chariot, holding the laurel of victory and the scepter of dominion, while flanking him with personified Virtus, was to suggest, in silver passing through every soldier's hand, that the qualities of a god were already at work in the man. The Senate would not vote him *divus* for another forty-five years. The coinage had been rehearsing the verdict from the start.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- Struck 19 BC
- Authority
- Augustus
- Reverse
- Augustus driving biga of elephants left, holding laurel branch and scepter