In 26 BC, on a night march through the Cantabrian mountains, a bolt of lightning struck close enough to Augustus to kill the slave walking ahead of him with a torch. The princeps survived, and Rome got a new temple. This denarius, struck around 19 BC at one of the Spanish mints that produced so much of Augustus's western coinage in this decade, advertises the result: a hexastyle temple on a three-stepped podium sheltering Jupiter Tonans, the Thunderer, who stands inside gripping the thunderbolt that had so nearly found his protégé. The legend IOV TON names him plainly.
Suetonius tells us Augustus dedicated the shrine on the Capitoline in gratitude for that escape, and that he placated an offended Capitoline Jupiter (who complained in a dream of being upstaged) by hanging bells from the new temple's eaves to suggest a doorkeeper's role. The obverse, CAESAR AVGVSTVS around the bare head, is almost demure beside the reverse: no wreath, no aegis, no divine attribute, just the man whom the king of the gods had personally declined to kill. For a regime still insisting it had restored the Republic, this was the more useful theology. Augustus did not need to be a god while Jupiter was visibly looking after him.
- Mint
- Uncertain Spanish mint
- Struck
- circa 19 BC
- Authority
- Augustus
- Reverse
- hexastyle temple set on a podium of three steps with Jupiter standing left within, holding thunderbolt and scepter