In AD 56, the boy emperor was still everyone's favorite. Struck at Antioch in the third regnal year of Nero and the 105th year of the Caesarean Era, this silver tetradrachm pairs the living princeps, crowned with the *corona civica* of the citizen-saver, with the laureate head of his adoptive father Claudius, now Divus Claudius, on the reverse. The pairing was the whole point: a nineteen-year-old ruler whose legitimacy ran entirely through the man Agrippina had married, adopted him into, and (Tacitus and Suetonius would insist) poisoned with a dish of mushrooms two years before. The Antiochene mint, dating its silver by the old Seleucid reckoning that began with Caesar's settlement of the East, was telling the Greek-speaking provinces that the dynasty held, that the deified predecessor blessed the heir, and that nothing had changed.
Within a year Nero would push his mother aside; within five he would have her killed; and the cult of Divus Claudius, which Seneca had already mocked in the *Apocolocyntosis*, would quietly wither. On this coin none of that has happened yet. The oak wreath still means what it says.
- Mint
- Antioch
- Struck
- AD 54-68, dated RY 3 and year 105 of the Caesarean Era (AD 56/7)
- Authority
- Nero
- Reverse
- Laureate head of Divus Claudius right with dates in right field