By the time this denarius left the mint of Rome, Salus had become an awkward goddess to invoke. The reverse shows her seated on an elaborately ornamented throne, patera extended in the gesture of offering, the other hand at rest, the picture of public health and imperial well-being; the obverse carries the laureate head of Nero, now in the final phase of his reign, dated by RIC to roughly AD 67-68. Salus on Neronian silver was not a new face, she had appeared earlier in the reign on coinage tied to the famous unmasking of the Pisonian conspiracy in 65, when the emperor's survival was something the mint genuinely wanted to advertise.
Two or three years later the message had curdled. Nero was abroad on his Greek tour for much of 67, competing in festivals and collecting crowns while Vindex stirred in Gaul and Galba waited in Spain; by June of 68 the Senate had declared him a public enemy and he was dead by his own hand in a freedman's villa outside Rome. A coin promising the safety of the emperor, struck in the months when that safety was visibly draining away, is the kind of object that tells you what a regime wished were true.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- circa AD 67-68
- Authority
- Nero