The most dangerous woman in Rome stares her son in the face on this denarius, and the question of who is staring whom down is the whole point. Struck early in Nero's reign, when Agrippina the Younger still expected to govern through the seventeen-year-old emperor she had spent a decade engineering onto the throne, the coin pairs their busts as near equals: his bare head, her draped portrait, eye to eye across the flan. The reverse retreats into civic decorum, EX S C inside the *corona civica*, the oak wreath voted to one who had saved a citizen's life, here doing diplomatic work by reminding viewers that the Senate had sanctioned this extraordinary advertisement of a mother's authority.
Hill's classification as Becker 157 places the piece among the imitations and problematic specimens that have haunted this celebrated type, since the genuine Lugdunum and Roman issues of AD 54 were copied early and copied often, and any collector handling a confronted-busts denarius today is buying into a scholarly argument as much as a coin. Within a year of the prototype's striking Nero had pushed Agrippina out of the palace; by 59 he had her killed, dispatching assassins after a collapsing boat in the Bay of Naples failed to do the work. The coin records the brief season when she still believed the arrangement she had built would hold.
- Mint
- Unknown
- Struck
- AD 54-68
- Authority
- Nero
- Reverse
- shows EX • S C within oak wreath