Roma sits at her work like a clerk taking dictation, knee braced under a shield, stylus poised, and that domestic posture is the whole point: the war is already won. This Lugdunum denarius of Nero (RIC I 34, struck AD 61 to 62, NERO CAESAR AVG IMP on the obverse, PONTIF MAX TR P VIII COS IIII P P with EX S C on the reverse) belongs to a moment when the young emperor, not yet twenty five, could still be sold to the silver-using provinces as a competent steward of empire. The dagger and bow at Roma's feet are not Italian weapons; they are the discarded gear of an eastern enemy, and the shield she inscribes is a victory monument in progress. The reference is almost certainly to Corbulo's campaigns in Armenia, where Roman arms had restored a client king and, for the moment, humiliated Parthia.
Nero himself never went near a battlefield, but the coinage of Lugdunum, struck for the western armies and the Gallic economy, was happy to lend him the borrowed dignity of Corbulo's spear. Within five years the Armenian settlement would be repackaged as the great theatrical reconciliation of AD 66, when Tiridates came to Rome to receive his diadem from Nero's own hand; within seven, Corbulo would be ordered to open his veins, and Nero himself would be dead in a freedman's villa. Here, though, Roma is still writing, and the ink is still wet.
- Mint
- Lugdunum
- Struck
- AD 61-62
- Authority
- Nero
- Reverse
- Roma standing right, holding and inscribing a shield supported on her left knee, with left foot on a helmet; dagger and bow at her feet to the right