Emerita Augusta, the colony Augustus founded for his discharged veterans (emeriti) of the Cantabrian campaigns, struck this denarius almost in the act of being born. The reverse trophy, hung with Celtiberian arms (the small round caetra, the curved falcata, native helmets), commemorates the brutal seven-year war in northwest Iberia that finally subdued the peninsula Rome had been trying to digest since the Second Punic War. Augustus took the field himself in 26 BC, fell ill at Tarraco, and left the finishing to his legates Antistius and Carisius; the official version, broadcast on coins like this one, was that the princeps had personally closed an account two centuries overdue.
The mint at Emerita, probably operating under Carisius, was effectively a victory monument that also paid wages, and the bare, unadorned head on the obverse, no wreath, no titles, no legend at all on this anepigraphic variety, lets the trophy do the talking. The Cantabrians would revolt again in 22 and 19 BC, and Agrippa would have to return to grind them down properly, but in 25 BC the message from Spain was simple: the war was won, the veterans were settled, and the boy who had inherited Caesar's name had finished what the Republic could not.
- Mint
- Emerita
- Struck
- circa 25-23 BC
- Authority
- Augustus