Augustus left no legend on this denarius, and he did not need to. The capricorn on the reverse, clutching a rudder fixed to a globe with a cornucopia rising from its back, is the most compressed political manifesto ever struck in silver: I steer the world, I feed it, and the stars themselves arranged this. The capricorn was Augustus's natal sign (or, more precisely, the sign of his conception, as Suetonius is careful to specify), and after Actium he made it the heraldic shorthand of the new order. By the time this coin left an uncertain eastern mint sometime after 27 BC, the year the Senate granted him the name Augustus, the symbolism had hardened into doctrine.
The globe is not aspiration but inventory. The rudder says the chaos of the civil wars has a single hand on it now. The cornucopia promises that the price of one man's supremacy is paid back in grain and peace. The laureate head on the obverse, stripped of any titulature, completes the argument by refusing to make one: everyone who handled this denarius from Antioch to Alexandria already knew whose face it was.
- Mint
- Uncertain Eastern mint
- Struck
- Struck after 27 BC
- Authority
- Augustus