The oak wreath on the reverse of this denarius is not decoration: it is the *corona civica*, the ancient Roman award for saving the life of a citizen, and by AD 60 it had become something close to imperial property. Augustus had received one from a grateful Senate in 27 BC, hung it over his door on the Palatine, and put it on his coinage; every emperor after him inherited the symbolism, the implication being that the *princeps* personally rescued every Roman, every day, simply by existing. Nero was nineteen or twenty when this coin was struck at Rome, four or five years into a reign that Seneca and Burrus were still steering with a reasonably steady hand, and the bare, unlaureate head on the obverse is the face of a young ruler being marketed as a civilian benefactor rather than a conqueror.
The legend EX S C inside the wreath, "by decree of the Senate," makes the fiction explicit: the honor is bestowed, not seized. Within four years Nero would be murdering his mother's memory along with much else, and within eight he would open his own veins in a freedman's villa outside Rome, but in 60 the oak leaves still meant what they were supposed to mean, and the Senate was still pretending to give them away.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- AD 60-61
- Authority
- Nero