A lituus floats beside the emperor's head like a quiet announcement: this man, bareheaded and unadorned, holds the keys to the sky. The lituus was the curved staff of the augur, the priest who read the will of the gods in the flight of birds, and Augustus had been one since 41 BC, long before he was Augustus at all. By 13 BC, the year this denarius was struck at Rome, he had accumulated priesthoods the way a lesser man accumulates villas, and the imagery had ripened into something almost casual. No legend crowds the portrait.
None is needed. On the reverse a quadriga gallops with a single palm frond standing upright in the car, the kind of triumphal token that adorned the rooftops of temples and the spina of the Circus Maximus, a miniature monument to victory rendered in silver. 13 BC was the year the Senate voted the Ara Pacis, the altar to the peace Augustus had wrestled out of a century of civil war, and the year his stepson Tiberius celebrated his first consulship while Agrippa returned from the East. The coin says less than it shows: priest and victor, the two offices that mattered, compressed into eighteen millimeters of bullion and handed to the legions.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- 13 BC
- Authority
- Augustus
- Reverse
- Galloping quadriga right bearing an upright palm frond