In 27 BC, the year the Senate handed Octavian the name Augustus and the fiction of the restored Republic took its definitive shape, a denarius struck at Pergamum showed the new princeps bare-headed, without diadem or wreath, on the obverse, and on the reverse a six-columned temple labeled IOVI OLV, to Olympian Jupiter. The choice is pointed. Pergamum was the eastern capital of the old Attalid kings and the site where the cult of Roma and Augustus would soon take institutional root, and the temple here is not a Roman one but the great Hellenistic shrine to Zeus Olympios, with its round shield set in the pediment like a Macedonian war trophy.
A coin issued in the first months of the new regime, in the very province Antony had governed and lost, identifies its master with the highest god of the Greek world while keeping his Roman face stubbornly unadorned. The message to the eastern cities was that the chaos was over, the temples would stand, and the man on the silver, whatever the Senate had just voted to call him, intended to be understood in the language they already spoke.
- Mint
- Pergamum
- Struck
- Struck 27 BC
- Authority
- Augustus
- Reverse
- shows a hexastyle temple of Olympian Jupiter on a three-tiered base with a round shield in the pediment and palmettes on top