Few coins in history are as openly, almost gleefully incriminating as this one. Struck in the field by Brutus's moneyer Lucius Plaetorius Cestianus in the months before Philippi, the EID MAR denarius does not allude or hint: it names the date, the Ides of March, and places between two drawn daggers the *pileus*, the felt cap given to a slave on the day of his manumission. The message is that Rome herself was the freedman, and Caesar the master from whom she had been liberated by the blades shown here.
That Brutus permitted his own bare head on the obverse, with the title IMP, is the sharper provocation: the man who killed a would-be king for putting his face on coins now put his face on coins. He could justify it (he was a *triumvir monetalis* by ancestry, a Junius descended, he claimed, from the founder of the Republic), but the contradiction is the point and he knew it. Within weeks of these coins leaving the military mint that traveled with the Liberators through Macedonia, Brutus was dead on the field at Philippi, and the daggers on the reverse had cut nothing loose: the Republic they were meant to restore was already a memory, and the coin survives as the most candid confession of political murder ever struck in silver.
- Mint
- Military mint traveling with Brutus and Cassius in western Asia Minor or northern Greece
- Struck
- Late summer-autumn 42 BC
- Authority
- Brutus
- Reverse
- pileus (freedman's cap) between two daggers pointing downward, symbolizing liberty and the instruments of Caesar's assassination