Trajan, at the height of his Dacian triumph, reached back more than three centuries to put a Republican hero back into Roman pockets. The coin is a denarius of Rome (RIC II 809), one of the so-called "restoration" issues in which the emperor reissued famous earlier types under his own authority, and the original it copies is a denarius of P. Cornelius Lentulus Marcellinus from around 50 BC, honoring his ancestor M. Claudius Marcellus, five times consul and the man who took Syracuse in 212 BC.
The obverse gives us Marcellus bare-headed with the triskeles of Sicily beside him, the family's proudest plunder; the reverse shows him carrying a trophy into a tetrastyle temple, the *Honos et Virtus* he vowed and his son completed, with the legend MARCELLVS COS QVINQ pinning down the five consulships. What turns this from antiquarian piety into political argument is the rest of the reverse: IMP CAES TRAIAN AVG GER DAC P P REST. Trajan, fresh from his own trophies and his own temple-building program, is telling the holder of the coin exactly which Republican company he means to keep. The conqueror of Dacia salutes the conqueror of Syracuse, and asks to be measured against him.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- circa AD 107 or 112/113
- Authority
- Trajan
- Reverse
- M