The Nero of this denarius is not yet the monster of later memory but a young man of twenty-three, three years into his reign and still working in the long shadow of his tutor Seneca and his prefect Burrus. Struck at Lugdunum in AD 60 or 61, the coin shows a clean-jawed, almost boyish profile, the hair combed forward in the neat coma in gradus formata that would soon thicken into the famous layered locks of his later portraits. The reverse is the more telling face. Roma, helmeted and armed, stands with her foot planted on a discarded helmet and inscribes a shield braced on her knee, a dagger and a bow lying at her feet. The pose is borrowed almost line for line from the coinage of Augustus and from the tradition of Victory inscribing res gestae onto a shield, and the iconography of trophies and barbarian weapons is unmistakable: this is Rome cataloguing her conquests.
The bow points east. In these very years Corbulo was campaigning in Armenia, taking Artaxata in 58 and Tigranocerta in 59, and the Lugdunum mint was producing a steady program of military reverses to dress the young princeps in borrowed laurels. Within three years the Armenian settlement would collapse into the disaster at Rhandeia, and within seven Boudica would have burned three British cities to the ground. For now, on a small disc of silver from the Rhone, the empire still inscribes its victories in the present tense.
- Mint
- Lugdunum
- Struck
- Struck AD 60-61
- Authority
- Nero