By the mid-60s, Nero had stopped pretending to be anyone's pupil. This denarius from the Roman mint, struck around AD 64-65 just as the great coinage reform was lightening the silver and recalibrating the aureus, shows him laureate on the obverse and then, on the reverse, shows him again: standing in a toga, head crowned with the rays of the sun, a branch in one hand and a Victory on a globe balanced in the other. The radiate crown is the giveaway. That solar nimbus had been borrowed from the iconography of the deified Augustus and was, on the coinage of living emperors, normally reserved for the dupondius as a denominational marker. Here it has migrated onto silver, onto the emperor's own person, in his own lifetime.
The branch promises peace, the Victory on the globe promises everything else, and the togate civilian dress insists that all of this is the gift of a Roman magistrate rather than a Hellenistic king. It is, of course, exactly the gesture of a Hellenistic king. This is the Nero of the Domus Aurea and the closing of the doors of Janus after the Parthian settlement with Tiridides, the Nero who would shortly tour Greece collecting victory wreaths at games rescheduled to suit his itinerary. Four years after this coin left the dies, the armies of Gaul, Spain and the Rhine would decide they had seen enough of the sun.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- circa AD 64-65
- Authority
- Nero
- Reverse
- Nero standing facing, radiate and togate, holding a branch and Victory on a globe