By AD 65, Nero had reasons to invoke Salus, the personified Health and Safety of the state, and most of them involved corpses. The Pisonian conspiracy had been uncovered that spring, and the executions and forced suicides that followed swept up Seneca, Lucan, and a wide cross-section of the senatorial class who had decided their emperor needed replacing. This denarius from the Rome mint, struck in the reformed lighter standard Nero introduced around 64, shows the laureate emperor on the obverse and Salus enthroned on the reverse, holding a patera over what one is meant to imagine as an altar. The throne is elaborately ornamented, the goddess composed: a picture of an institution preserved.
It was also, in the language Roman emperors used to talk to their subjects through small silver discs, a thank-offering. Salus appeared on coinage when an emperor had survived something, and the something here was an aristocratic plot to murder him in the Circus. Within three years the next conspiracy would succeed and Nero would be opening his own throat in a freedman's villa outside the city, but in 65 the goddess of public welfare still sat calmly on her decorated chair, and the silver still left the mint promising that Rome was, against the evidence, well.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- circa AD 65-66
- Authority
- Nero