Two bare heads, no diadem, no laurel, no divinizing star: just Augustus and Marcus Agrippa facing each other across a silver disc, equals in the iconography if not in the constitution. This denarius (RIC I 408), struck at Rome in 13 BC by the moneyer Sulpicius Platorinus, is one of the clearest visual statements Augustus ever permitted about the man who had won his wars and was now expected to steward his settlement. The legend CAESAR AVGVSTVS on the obverse and M • AGRIPPA • PLATORINVS • III • VIR on the reverse register the formal hierarchy, but the portraits insist on parity.
By 13 BC Agrippa held tribunician power and a renewed imperium, had married Augustus's daughter Julia, and had fathered the boys Gaius and Lucius whom Augustus would adopt as his own. The coin is, in effect, a public reassurance that the principate had a spine of two men and a future of grandsons. Within a year Agrippa was dead in Campania, and Augustus would spend the next quarter century burying the heirs this silver had quietly promised.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- Struck 13 BC
- Authority
- Augustus
- Reverse
- bare head of Agrippa right