A comet on a coin is never just a comet, and the eight-rayed star blazing across the reverse of this denarius (RIC I 38b, struck at an uncertain Spanish mint around 19 to 18 BC) is the most politically useful astronomical event in Roman history. When games were held in July 44 BC to honor the recently murdered Julius Caesar, a comet appeared in the daytime sky for seven days running. Octavian, then a teenager scrambling to inherit a name and a faction, declared it the soul of Caesar ascending to the gods, and the *sidus Iulium* was born. Three decades later, now Augustus and uncontested master of the Roman world, he was still cashing the dividend.
The reverse legend DIVVS IVLIVS names the deified adoptive father whose divinity made the son, by perfectly logical Roman extension, *divi filius*. On the obverse, Augustus wears the *corona civica*, the oak wreath voted him by the Senate in 27 BC for saving the lives of citizens, a civic honor that quietly papered over the inconvenient fact that he had also taken many of those lives to get where he was. The pairing is the entire Augustan settlement in miniature: a living princeps crowned for mercy on one side, a dead dictator turned god on the other, and between them the unspoken claim that heaven itself had ratified the arrangement. A comet seen by farmers in Campania had become the load-bearing wall of a monarchy that refused to call itself one.
- Mint
- Uncertain Spanish mint
- Struck
- 19-18 BC
- Authority
- Augustus
- Reverse
- Comet of eight rays with tail upward, with DIVVS above and IVLIVS below