A Roman denarius that puts a Spanish boomtown on its reverse is doing something unusual, and this issue from the mint at Emerita is exactly that. Struck around 25 to 23 BC under the moneyer P. Carisius (whose name often appears on companion types from the same workshop), the coin pairs the bare head of Augustus, unadorned and citizen-like, with the schematic walls of the city he had just founded: Emerita Augusta, modern Mérida, settled with veterans of the *legiones* V Alaudae and X Gemina after the brutal Cantabrian Wars. The image on the reverse is almost diagrammatic, a circular circuit of walls broken by a single arched gate with EMERITA spelled out above it, as if the engraver wanted to certify the place's existence in stone and silver simultaneously.
That was, in a sense, the point. Augustus had marched into northwestern Iberia to finish what Rome had been failing to finish for two centuries, and the colony was the punctuation mark at the end of that campaign: discharged soldiers settled on conquered land, a Roman grid laid over Lusitanian country, and now a coinage to circulate the news. The walls on the reverse are not a fortification against any real enemy. They are the legal silhouette of a Roman city, and on this denarius they announce that the western edge of the empire has just acquired one more.
- Mint
- Emerita
- Struck
- circa 25-23 BC
- Authority
- Augustus