A century after the fact, the comet still burned. This denarius (RIC I 92) was struck not by Augustus but in his name, somewhere in Spain or Gaul in AD 68, as the rebellion against Nero gathered momentum and the moneyers of the western provinces reached back across a hundred years for a face that meant legitimacy. The obverse carries the laureate head of the long dead first princeps with the legend CAESAR AVGVSTVS (the engraver's blundered CLVESAR LVGVSTVS betrays a die-cutter copying letters he may not have fully understood).
The reverse is the older image: the eight-rayed sidus Iulium, the comet that blazed over Rome during the games Octavian staged in 44 BC for his murdered adoptive father, with DIVVS IVLIVS across the field. Augustus had used that comet to turn Caesar into a god and himself into a god's son, and the rebels of 68, casting about for an idiom of legitimate authority against a Julio-Claudian who had disgraced the name, borrowed his vocabulary wholesale. They were invoking the founder to unmake his last heir, and within months Nero would open his own throat.
- Mint
- Uncertain mint in Spain or Gaul
- Struck
- AD 68
- Authority
- Augustus
- Reverse
- Comet of eight rays with DIVVS IVLIVS across field