Here is a portrait of a teenager being marketed as the future of Rome, struck while the man whose name appeared on the rest of the coinage, Claudius, was still alive and still pretending he had a choice. D. 50 and 54: the years between his adoption by Claudius in 50 and his accession in October 54. The reverse is the giveaway. A simpulum on a tripod, a lituus on a patera: the tools of the augur and the pontiff, the priestly kit of a Roman magistrate in waiting.
Nero had been co-opted into the major priestly colleges as a boy, and these instruments advertise that membership without needing a legend to spell it out. Agrippina, Claudius's fourth wife and Nero's mother, had engineered the adoption over the prior claim of Britannicus, Claudius's own son, and every issue like this one was a small hammer-blow in the long campaign to make the succession look inevitable rather than arranged. By the time Claudius ate the famous mushrooms, the Roman public had been looking at coins like this for four years. The priestly emblems on the reverse promised continuity and piety. What arrived instead was the reign that ended with a sword in a freedman's villa and the Senate's vote of damnatio.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- A.D. 50-54
- Authority
- Nero
- Reverse
- shows a simpulum atop a tripod altar on the left and a lituus atop a patera on the right