A wild boar, transfixed by a hunter's spear and lurching forward on stiffened forelegs, is an unexpected thing to find on the silver of the man who had just finished reordering the Roman world. Yet here it is on the reverse of this anonymous denarius struck at Rome around 19 or 18 BC, paired with the bare, unlabelled head of Augustus, the legends stripped away entirely. The silence is the point. By the late 20s BC the moneyers' coinage had grown crowded with titles and symbols of the new regime, and this issue belongs to a series that pulls hard in the opposite direction, letting image do the work that words had been doing.
As for the boar: the likeliest reading is that it evokes the Calydonian hunt or, more plausibly given Augustan tastes, the venatio and the aristocratic hunt as a register of virtus, a quiet borrowing of Hellenistic royal iconography in which kings from Alexander onward had themselves shown spearing game. Augustus had just received the tribunician power for life and was settling into the constitutional fiction of the restored Republic; a denarius that says nothing and shows a princely sport says a great deal about how he wished to be seen. The hunter does not appear on the coin. He did not need to.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- 19/8 BC
- Authority
- Augustus