In AD 64, the year Rome itself burned, the mint at Antioch was striking tetradrachms that draped Nero in the aegis of Jupiter and Minerva, the goatskin breastplate of the gods. McAlee 265b shows the emperor laureate and divinely armored on the obverse, with the inscription ETOYΣ BIP • I marking a double date: regnal year 10 and year 112 of the Caesarean Era of Antioch, the local count that began with Julius Caesar's settlement of the East in 49 BC. On the reverse stands the eagle of Zeus on a thunderbolt, wings spread, palm at its side, an image Antioch would keep striking for emperor after emperor until the type became almost a civic signature of the Syrian capital. The aegis is the detail that rewards a second look.
Roman portraiture used it sparingly and pointedly, a borrowing from Augustus and from the Hellenistic kings before him, signaling not merely rule but a participation in divine authority. On a provincial silver piece circulating through the markets of Syria, where Seleucid memory was long and the iconography of god kings was native vocabulary, this was Nero speaking the local dialect of power. Within four years he would be dead by his own hand outside Rome, the Senate's *damnatio* hanging over his name, but the eagle on the thunderbolt kept flying at Antioch, indifferent to whose head it carried.
- Mint
- Antioch
- Struck
- AD 54-68; RY 10 and year 112 of the Caesarean Era (AD 64)
- Authority
- Nero