In AD 64, the year Rome burned, the mint at Antioch was striking Nero in the guise of a god. This silver tetradrachm (McAlee 264) drapes the young emperor in the aegis, the scaled cloak of Zeus and Athena, a divine costume the Julio-Claudians had been edging toward for decades but which the Greek East could put onto silver without the political squeamishness of the Roman senate. The dual dating below the bust, regnal year 10 (I) and year 112 of the Caesarean Era of Antioch (BIP), is the quiet tell: this is a coin speaking Antioch's own civic time as much as Nero's, a reminder that Syria reckoned its years from Julius Caesar's settlement of the East and went on doing so regardless of who sat on the Palatine.
The reverse eagle on a thunderbolt, palm at its side, is the standard Antiochene language for Zeus and victory, but paired with an aegis-clad Nero it reads as a single sentence: the princeps is the god's vessel, and the god's bird stands ready. Tetradrachms like this paid the legions of the eastern frontier through Corbulo's Armenian campaigns and would still be circulating, worn smooth, when Vespasian marched the same coinage west to make himself emperor five years later.
- Mint
- Antioch
- Struck
- AD 54-68; RY 10 and year 112 of the Caesarean Era (AD 64)
- Authority
- Nero
- Reverse
- Eagle standing right on thunderbolt with wings displayed and palm frond to right