The reverse is a trophy room: a Celtiberian helmet with its grim faceplate and horsehair crest, a short stabbing dagger, a double-headed axe (the *bipennis*) angled across the field. These are not Roman weapons. They are the spoils of the peoples of northwestern Iberia, and Augustus had been hunting them in person, or trying to, between 26 and 25 BC, when illness drove him to convalesce at Tarraco while his legates finished what he could not. The denarius was struck at Emerita Augusta, the colony Publius Carisius founded in 25 BC to settle the *eméritī*, the veterans discharged from the Cantabrian campaigns, on land taken from the defeated.
So the coin is a closed circuit: the soldiers who broke the Cantabri and Astures were paid in silver that depicted the gear of the men they had killed, in a city built on the ground those men had lost. The bare head on the obverse, no laurel, no diadem, is the careful fiction of the early *principate*, a *princeps* who is merely first among citizens even as his procurator stamps conquered weapons onto the coinage of a veteran colony bearing his name. The Cantabrian wars would drag on, with revolts, until Agrippa finished the work in 19 BC, but in 25 the propaganda was already running ahead of the legions.
- Mint
- Emerita
- Struck
- Struck 25-23 BC
- Authority
- Augustus
- Reverse
- Celtiberian helmet decorated with face and crest, short dagger pointing downward on left, bipennis slanting upward on right