In October of 19 BC, Augustus came home. He had been away in the East for the better part of three years, settling Parthia, recovering the legionary standards lost by Crassus at Carrhae, and reorganizing the provinces, and the Senate marked his return by voting an altar to Fortuna Redux, the goddess who brings men back. This denarius, struck at an uncertain Spanish mint within months of that vote, shows the altar itself: a plain rectangular block bearing the dedication FORT • RED / CAES • AVG / S • P • Q • R, Fortuna the Home-Bringer, to Caesar Augustus, from the Senate and the Roman People.
The design is almost severe in its restraint, and that is the point. Augustus had spent the 20s perfecting a visual language in which the princeps received honors rather than demanded them, and an altar voted by the SPQR was exactly the kind of monument that let him be celebrated as a private citizen lucky enough to come home safely, rather than as the autocrat whose absence had unsettled the empire. The laureate head on the obverse tells one story; the reverse, with no figure of Augustus at all, tells the more careful one.
- Mint
- Uncertain Spanish mint
- Struck
- circa 20-19 BC
- Authority
- Augustus