A flower, on a denarius of the man who had just made himself master of the Mediterranean world. RIC I 309 is one of the more disarming products of the Roman mint under Augustus, struck around 18 BC: on one side the bare head of the princeps, unlabelled, the legend stripped away as if his face required no caption; on the other, a single six-petalled blossom opening across the flan. The temptation is to read it as nothing more than a die-engraver's flourish, and the type is sometimes filed under "anonymous floral issues" without further comment.
But 18 BC was the year of the leges Iuliae, the great moral legislation that tried to push Romans back toward marriage, childbearing, and ancestral virtue, and it sat in the middle of a deliberate program of coinage that paired the unadorned image of Augustus with symbols, oak wreaths, comets, capricorns, laurel, that did the talking the legends declined to do. A flower in full bloom, on silver carried in every purse in Italy, reads easily enough in that company: fertility, renewal, the saeculum aureum the Secular Games would proclaim just one year later in 17 BC. Augustus had learned the lesson of his adoptive father's denarii, that the most powerful image is often the one that lets the viewer supply the meaning.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- circa 18 BC
- Authority
- Augustus