Two emperors share this small disc of Antiochene silver, and the joke, if you can call it that, is that one of them poisoned the other. On the obverse Nero wears the laurel of a living princeps; on the reverse his adoptive father Claudius wears the laurel of a god, the deification that Seneca had skewered in the Apocolocyntosis almost as soon as the funeral pyre cooled.
The tetradrachm belongs to the long Syrian series struck at Antioch in the middle and later years of Nero's reign, when the eastern provinces were paying for Corbulo's Armenian campaigns in their own familiar Greek-weight silver rather than in denarii, and the message it carried east was the dynastic one Nero needed: he was the son of the Divine Claudius, legitimate heir to the Julio-Claudian house, the boy Agrippina had married into power and then cleared the path for. By the time many of these coins left the dies, Agrippina herself was dead at her son's order, Britannicus had been dispatched at dinner years earlier, and the pious filial reverse had become a piece of theatre that everyone in Antioch could see for what it was: the regime insisting, in good silver, on a paternity it had spent a decade trying to outrun.
- Mint
- Antioch
- Struck
- AD 54-68, struck circa AD 63-68
- Authority
- Nero