In AD 6, while Rome was busy absorbing the shock of the Pannonian revolt and Augustus was reorganizing the fiscus to pay for the legions putting it down, the mint at Seleucia Pieria struck this silver tetradrachm with a quietly audacious reverse: a thunderbolt, draped with a fillet, resting on an empty throne. The throne belongs to Zeus Keraunios, the great god of Seleucia whose cult predated Roman arrival by nearly three centuries, and the laureate head on the obverse belongs to the man who had taken Syria from Antony at Actium and never given it back. The exergual IΔP marks the year 114 of the Seleucid era, a reminder that Augustus was being slotted into a calendar invented by the generals of Alexander, his image circulating among Greek-speaking merchants who counted time from the founding of a kingdom Rome had dismantled.
The throne is empty because the god is present only as his weapon, and the princeps who shares the coin shares, by implication, the seat. It is a theology Augustus would never have permitted on a denarius struck at Lugdunum, but Syria was not Gaul, and the mint at Seleucia knew its audience.
- Mint
- Seleucia Pieria
- Struck
- SE 114 (AD 6)
- Authority
- Augustus