Virtus on the reverse of a Neronian denarius is a small joke history played without meaning to. Struck at Rome in AD 60 or 61, when Nero was still in his early twenties and the empire still flattered itself that Seneca and Burrus had the boy in hand, this denarius (RIC I 26) shows the emperor bare-headed, without diadem or wreath or any of the divinizing apparatus that would clutter his later coinage. The reverse offers Virtus, the personification of martial manliness, standing with parazonium and scepter, foot planted on a discarded helmet or cuirass in the classic pose of conquest achieved.
The legend EX SC, *ex senatus consulto*, advertises that this issue moves by the Senate's authority, a courtesy the early Neronian regime was still careful to observe on its silver. The image flatters a princeps who had as yet fought no war and would, in the fullness of time, prefer the lyre to the sword: but in 60 or 61 Corbulo was hammering Armenia into shape on Rome's eastern frontier, and an emperor could borrow his generals' Virtus the way he borrowed their legions. Within four years the Pisonian conspiracy would expose how thin this iconography wore; within eight, Nero would die badly in a freedman's villa, and the Senate whose authority this coin invokes would damn his memory.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- AD 60-61
- Authority
- Nero