The trophy on the reverse of this denarius is a pile of Celtiberian junk: a helmet and cuirass set above a tangle of round shields, lances, and javelins, the spoils of a war that Augustus needed badly to win and very nearly did not. Struck at Emerita around 25 to 23 BC, almost certainly under the moneyer P. Carisius who governed Lusitania during the campaigns, the coin advertises the subjugation of the Cantabrians and Astures in the wet, vertical country of Spain's northern coast, the last corner of the peninsula to resist Roman arms after two centuries of grinding conquest.
Augustus came north in person in 26 BC, fell ill at Tarraco, and left the hard fighting to his legates; the war he declared finished was reopened by revolts in 22 and again in 19, and only Agrippa's brutal final campaign actually pacified the region, by the simple method of killing or enslaving most of the fighting-age men and resettling the survivors in the valleys where they could be watched. The bare head on the obverse, unadorned by laurel or title on this issue, belongs to a princeps still building the visual grammar of his rule, and Emerita itself, the colony founded for veterans of these wars (its name means exactly that, the discharged), was the war's monument in stone as the trophy was its monument in silver. The pile of arms says victory; the date range says the victory had to be won twice more before the silver told the truth.
- Mint
- Emerita
- Struck
- circa 25-23 BC
- Authority
- Augustus
- Reverse
- trophy of Celtiberian arms including helmet, cuirass, shield, and javelins erected on a heap of round shields, lances, and other arms