Here is a coin that shows you, in miniature, how Octavian intended to be understood the morning after Actium. On the reverse, the future Augustus walks behind a yoked pair of oxen, head veiled in the manner of a priest, cutting the *sulcus primigenius*, the original furrow that traced the sacred boundary of a new colony. It is the gesture of Romulus at the founding of Rome, borrowed without apology, and it is being performed in 30 or 29 BC, the precise moment when Octavian was settling tens of thousands of his veterans on confiscated land across Italy and the provinces and needed those settlements to feel less like a military occupation and more like an act of pious refoundation. The Apollo on the obverse is no accident either: this is the god Octavian had claimed as his personal patron since before Actium, the deity whose temple on the Palatine he was then building next to his own house.
Put the two sides together and the program is complete. A new Romulus, sanctioned by a new patron god, plowing a new Rome into existence on the bones of the civil wars. The Senate would vote him the name Augustus within eighteen months, but the argument for it is already here, pressed into silver.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- ca. 30-29 B.C.
- Authority
- Augustus
- Reverse
- Veiled, draped figure of Octavian plowing right with a pair of yoked oxen