The shield on the reverse is the point of the whole exercise. In 27 BC the Senate had voted Octavian a *clipeus virtutis*, a golden shield inscribed with his four cardinal virtues (valor, clemency, justice, piety) and hung in the Curia Julia for everyone to see. This denarius, struck a decade later at one of the Spanish mints that Augustus used heavily in the 20s and teens BC, miniaturizes that shield and puts it in the hand of every soldier and tax collector in the western provinces: SPQR above, CL V (*clipeus virtutis*) below, the Senate and People certifying the *princeps* on metal that would circulate from Gades to the Rhine.
The obverse keeps things deliberately modest, CAESAR AVGVSTVS around a bare head, no diadem, no laurel, no divine attributes. That restraint is the message. Augustus had spent the 20s building a constitutional fiction in which he was simply the best of the citizens, voted his honors rather than seizing them, and the coin asks you to read the shield as proof: not a king's coin but a grateful republic's, struck by a man who happened to command thirty legions and most of the known world.
- Mint
- Uncertain Spanish mint
- Struck
- 19-18 BC
- Authority
- Augustus