A lion taking down a stag is not the sort of image one expects on the small change of the Augustan peace, and yet here it is on a denarius struck at Rome in 19 or 18 BC, the moneyer's name and the usual chatter of legends both stripped away to leave the scene in austere silence. The obverse offers Augustus bare-headed, the citizen-princeps in his preferred unadorned guise, but the reverse is where the argument lives: a predator at the throat of its prey, an image with a long pedigree on Greek coinage and Macedonian seals, here recast for a Roman audience that had just watched its first citizen accept the return of the Parthian standards, settle the East, and stage the Secular Games of 17 BC on the near horizon. The lion was a creature of kings and of Hercules, the stag a victim that does not fight back.
Whether contemporaries read the type as the strength of Rome devouring her enemies, as a cosmological emblem borrowed from the Hellenistic repertoire, or simply as a moneyer's flourish in a year crowded with elaborate reverses, the image refuses to soften itself. Augustus liked to speak the language of restoration and modesty, but he was content to let his silver speak in older, harder pictures.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- 19/8 BC
- Authority
- Augustus
- Reverse
- lion bringing down stag to the left