A boy of seventeen had just become emperor, and one of his first acts in silver was to put his stepfather on a coin and call him a god. This denarius from Lugdunum, struck in AD 54 or 55, shows the laureate head of Divus Claudius on the obverse and on the reverse the elaborate ceremonial quadriga, surmounted by four miniature horses and flanked by Victories, that had carried Claudius's image in the pompa circensis after his consecration. The vehicle is the *tensa*, the parade car reserved for the gods, and its appearance here is the visual proof of senatorial decree: Claudius had been voted divine honors, a temple on the Caelian, a flamen (Nero's mother Agrippina, no less), and the right to ride with Jupiter and Mars in the circus procession.
For Nero, fresh from a smooth accession that Agrippina had engineered with ruthless efficiency, the message was dynastic legitimacy in its purest form. He was the son of a god, by adoption, and the silver said so to every soldier and merchant from the Rhône to the Rhine. That the same Claudius had probably been poisoned by the same Agrippina, with mushrooms famously described by Nero himself as the food of the gods, is a detail the coinage declines to address.
- Mint
- Lugdunum
- Struck
- AD 54-55
- Authority
- Nero