Of all the symbols Augustus could have stamped on his silver in 17 BC, he chose the headgear of an archaic priest and a pair of shields that fell, so the story went, from the sky in the reign of Numa. The reverse of this denarius (RIC I 343, struck at Rome by the moneyer P. Licinius Stolo) shows the *apex* of a *flamen*, that pointed leather cap secured by a chinstrap and topped with an olive twig, flanked by two of the *ancilia*, the figure-eight shields that the Salii carried in their leaping March processions through the city. The original *ancile* had reportedly dropped from heaven into Numa's hands as a pledge of Roman invincibility, and eleven copies were forged so no thief could identify the real one: priestly intelligence work, eighth century BC.
Why advertise this in 17 BC? Because that was the year of the *Ludi Saeculares*, the Secular Games, which Augustus staged to mark the close of one *saeculum* and the dawn of the next, with Horace's *Carmen Saeculare* sung by a choir of boys and girls on the Palatine. The legend AVGVSTVS TR POT keeps the constitutional fiction tidy (he rules by tribunician power, nothing more), while the reverse insists on something older and stranger: that the *princeps* is the curator of Rome's deepest religious machinery, the man who has restored the colleges, refilled the priesthoods, and put Numa's shields back in working order. Coins like this are how a revolution learns to call itself a restoration.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- 17 BC
- Authority
- Augustus
- Reverse
- Apex flaminis (Flamen's cap) between two ancilia (studded, oval shields pinched in at the middle)