Strike this denarius in 62 or 63 and you are catching Nero in the brief window before everything curdled. The young emperor's portrait is still recognizably the boy his handlers had marketed: clean profile, no jowls, no beard of mourning, none of the bull neck that would soon dominate his coinage. Turn the coin over and Roma herself, helmet at her foot and a barbarian's dagger and bow scattered at her feet, leans on her knee to inscribe a shield. The pose is borrowed wholesale from Augustan and Julio-Claudian precedent, a citation rather than a statement, and that is the point: at Lugdunum, the Gallic mint that produced Rome's western silver, the message was continuity.
The Parthian war under Corbulo was grinding through its long second act, Boudicca's revolt was barely two years cooled, and Seneca and Burrus were still steering the regime, though Burrus would die in 62 and Seneca would soon withdraw. Roma writing on her shield is Rome accounting for herself, victories tallied, enemies disarmed, the princeps young and the world in order. Within five years Nero would be dead in a freedman's villa, and the legend on no shield would record that.
- Mint
- Lugdunum
- Struck
- AD 62-63
- Authority
- Nero