The shield on this denarius is the whole argument. Struck around 19 to 18 BC at one of the Spanish mints still puzzling numismatists, this silver piece (RIC I 45) shows Augustus on the obverse crowned with the *corona civica*, the oak wreath voted to him for saving the lives of citizens, while the reverse sends Victory winging across the field to crown a round shield propped against a column and marked SPQR. That shield is the *clipeus virtutis*, the golden buckler the Senate had hung in the Curia Julia in 27 BC to advertise the princeps's four cardinal virtues: *virtus*, *clementia*, *iustitia*, *pietas*.
The actual object, recorded in the *Res Gestae* and echoed in a marble copy from Arles, was the centerpiece of the constitutional settlement that converted the warlord Octavian into Augustus, and here it is reissued in pocket-sized silver a decade on, paired with the civic crown so that the message reads as a single sentence: this man saved you, and the Senate said so in gold. The coin does not argue for the new regime. It treats the argument as already won.
- Mint
- Uncertain Spanish mint
- Struck
- Struck circa 19-18 BC
- Authority
- Augustus
- Reverse
- Victory flying right, holding wreath above round shield inscribed with clipeus virtutis, resting against tall column