Roma, that armed and unsmiling personification of the city, is doing something curiously domestic on the reverse of this denarius: balancing a shield on her knee and writing on it, her foot planted on a discarded helmet, a dagger and bow lying nearby. The pose is borrowed, knowingly, from coins of the Republic and from Augustan precedent, and on a Neronian denarius of AD 63 to 64 (RIC I 43) it is meant to read as victory recorded rather than victory won. The trophies at her feet point east, to the long, embarrassing war over Armenia that Corbulo had been waging against Parthia since the start of the reign.
By 63 a settlement was at hand: Tiridates would have his throne, but only after travelling to Rome to receive the diadem from Nero's own hand, a piece of theatre staged in 66 that Nero loved and the Senate endured. The bare head on the obverse, ungarlanded, still presents the youngish princeps in the restrained idiom of his early coinage, even as the reform of the denarius standard was underway in these very years and the regime's tone was beginning to shift. Roma, writing the dispatch, is the propaganda made permanent in silver: the eastern question closed, on Roman terms, by a settlement most contemporaries understood was a compromise.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- AD 63-64
- Authority
- Nero