By AD 61/62, Nero was still the golden boy of the empire, a young Caesar whose murder of his mother was three years behind him and whose burning of Rome was three years ahead, and the silver tetradrachms pouring out of Antioch (McAlee 258) showed him exactly as the East was meant to see him: laureate, draped in the aegis of Jupiter himself, a Roman princeps wearing the costume of a god. The reverse keeps to the old Seleucid grammar that Antioch's mint had been speaking for centuries, an eagle on a thunderbolt with wings spread and a palm frond at its side, a design that had outlived dynasties and would outlive this one too. The double date in the exergue, regnal year 8 paired with year 110 of the Caesarian Era (the H and IP of the Greek numerals), fixes the issue to a precise moment when Corbulo was campaigning against Parthia in Armenia and Syrian silver was needed to pay the legions who would settle that war.
The aegis was a deliberate choice: not the citizen-emperor of the Roman denarii but a Hellenistic ruler in divine dress, pitched to subjects who had always expected their kings to look like gods. Within seven years the man under the laurel would be dead by his own hand in a suburban villa, and the eagle on the thunderbolt would be striking for Galba.
- Mint
- Antioch
- Struck
- AD 54-68, RY 8 and year 110 of the Caesarian Era (AD 61/2)
- Authority
- Nero