Antioch's mint, in the sixth regnal year of Nero and the 108th of the city's Caesarean reckoning (AD 59/60), put a young emperor on a tetradrachm and dressed him in Olympian armor. The aegis draped over Nero's shoulder is not casual ornament: it is the goatskin breastplate of Jupiter and Minerva, a divine attribute that Augustus had quietly appropriated and that his successors deployed when they wanted the East to read them as something more than mortal magistrates. On the reverse, the eagle of Zeus stands on a thunderbolt with a palm at its side, an image so deeply Seleucid that any Syrian merchant weighing the coin would have felt the continuity in his palm before he read the date.
This was the language Antioch understood, and Nero, or rather the men still managing him in the early years before Agrippina's murder fully curdled the regime, was fluent in it. The boy on this flan was seventeen when his mother was killed and twenty-two when he sang at his own Greek games; the coin belongs to the brief window when the Neronian image was still being calibrated for foreign provinces rather than scandalizing Roman ones, and when an eastern subject could look at the silver in his hand and see, quite reasonably, a competent young god.
- Mint
- Antioch
- Struck
- AD 54-68, RY 6 and year 108 of the Caesarean Era (AD 59/60)
- Authority
- Nero