The kneeling Parthian on the reverse of this denarius is doing something no Roman army had managed to compel by force: he is handing back the eagles. In 53 BC at Carrhae, Crassus had lost seven legions and their standards to the Parthian cavalry, a humiliation that festered in Roman memory for a generation and which Antony had only deepened with his own bungled eastern campaign. Augustus retrieved them in 20 BC not by battle but by diplomacy, the threat of Tiberius marching through Armenia sufficient to extract from Phraates IV what no general had achieved.
The coin, struck at Rome a year or two after the settlement, dresses that diplomatic transaction in the costume of conquest: the Parthian kneels, the vexillum (here marked X for the tenth legion, or perhaps simply numbering the recovered standards) is offered up like spoil, and the obverse personification of Honos certifies that Roman honor itself has been restored. It is one of the most carefully managed pieces of political theater in the Augustan repertoire, repeated on the breastplate of the Prima Porta statue and on the Parthian arch in the Forum, and it teaches a lesson the regime wanted learned: the princeps could undo Carrhae with a letter.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- 19/8 BC
- Authority
- Augustus
- Reverse
- shows a Parthian kneeling right, extending a signum with attached vexillum marked X in the right hand, and holding out the left hand below the left knee