By AD 64 Nero had stopped pretending he was anyone's apprentice. The reverse of this denarius (RIC I 45) shows him radiate and togate, patera in one hand and a long scepter in the other, paired with an empress veiled and bearing cornucopia: AVGVSTVS AVGVSTA, the imperial couple as a matched set of deities in waiting. The radiate crown is the giveaway. On a living emperor's portrait it had until now been reserved for the dupondius, a denominational marker; here Nero wears it on a silver denarius alongside himself in laurels on the obverse, a quiet but unmistakable claim on solar divinity.
The empress is almost certainly Poppaea Sabina, whom he had married in 62 after divorcing and then executing Octavia, and who would die in 65, by ancient report from a kick Nero delivered while she was pregnant. The coin was struck in the same window as the great fire of Rome and the reform that lightened the denarius and the aureus to fund what came after: the Domus Aurea, the Greek tour, the singing. Held in the hand, it is a small piece of a larger argument, that Nero and his wife were not merely Augustus and Augusta in title but something nearer to Sol and Ceres feeding the world. Within four years he would be dead in a freedman's villa, and the senate would vote to scratch his name from the record it had not yet finished carving.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- circa AD 64-65
- Authority
- Nero
- Reverse
- Nero radiate and togate standing left holding patera and long scepter; empress veiled and draped standing left holding patera and cornucopia