A star floats beside Nero's laureate head on this Antiochene tetradrachm, and on the reverse stares back the man he had succeeded by way of a poisoned mushroom: Divus Claudius, his adoptive father, his mother's husband, and (if Tacitus and Suetonius are to be believed) her victim. Struck in Syria sometime after 63, the coin performs a piety that the court in Rome had largely abandoned. Nero's enthusiasm for Claudius's memory had cooled fast after Agrippina's own murder in 59, the temple to the new god on the Caelian was left half built, and the jokes about Claudius's deification (a pumpkin, said Seneca, would have been more dignified) circulated freely.
Yet Antioch, minting for the eastern provinces where dynastic legitimacy still mattered more than Roman gossip, kept pairing son with deified father, the star above Nero's brow tying him to the celestial company Claudius now supposedly kept. It is propaganda by inheritance, issued in silver for soldiers and merchants who needed to be told, in the simplest visual grammar available, that the young man on the obverse was the rightful heir of the god on the reverse.
- Mint
- Antioch
- Struck
- AD 54-68, struck circa AD 63-68
- Authority
- Nero
- Reverse
- Laureate head of Divus Claudius right