By the time this denarius was struck, Augustus had been dead for more than half a century, and Nero, the last of his bloodline, had just opened his veins in a freedman's villa outside Rome. That is the context for the radiate head on the obverse: not the living princeps but the *Divus Augustus*, the founding god of a dynasty that had, in AD 68, finally run out of heirs. The rebels who lifted Galba to the purple in Spain, or perhaps the Vindex faction in Gaul (the mint is disputed), reached past the immediate Julio-Claudian wreckage to the legitimacy of the founder himself, ringing his old IMP X acclamation with a crescent and seven stars, the celestial furniture of apotheosis. These so-called "anonymous" or "civil war" issues of 68-69 are a curious moment in Roman money: coins that name no living emperor because no one yet knew which living emperor would last.
Striking Augustus in this moment was an argument, not a memorial. The men who paid soldiers with these denarii were saying that the Republic restored in 27 BC could be restored again, that the principate was a thing larger than any one Caesar's body. Within eighteen months four more emperors would test that proposition, and three of them would die for it.
- Mint
- Spain or Gaul
- Struck
- AD 68-69
- Authority
- Augustus
- Reverse
- shows IMP X in crescent with seven stars in arc above