Strike this coin in the spring of AD 68 and you are not honoring Augustus, you are weaponizing him. The bare head on the obverse belongs to the founder of the principate, dead more than half a century, but the hand cutting the dies belongs to one of the rebels who in a few frantic months would unmake Nero: the so-called "military" or anonymous coinages issued from an uncertain mint in Spain or Gaul, almost certainly in the orbit of Galba's revolt that began on 3 April. The reverse is a small masterpiece of borrowed authority. Augustus's capricorn, his birth-sign and personal badge since the Actium settlement, clutches a globe lashed to a rudder while a cornucopia rides its back: world dominion, steady steerage, abundance, the whole Augustan promise compressed into one creature, with AVGVSTVS spelled out in case anyone missed the point.
The message to the legions and to the cities of the Spanish and Gallic provinces was that the rising against Nero was not a rebellion at all but a restoration, a return to the founder's order after a Julio-Claudian who had embarrassed it. Within weeks Nero was dead by his own shaky hand, Galba was marching on Rome, and the year of four emperors was under way. The coin promised Augustan steadiness; what it delivered was civil war.
- Mint
- Uncertain mint in Spain or Gaul
- Struck
- 3 April-mid June AD 68
- Authority
- Augustus
- Reverse
- shows a capricorn facing right, holding a globe attached to a rudder between its front hooves, with a cornucopia above its back