That little V on the voting tablet is doing a great deal of work. On this denarius struck at Rome in 60 BC, the moneyer L. Cassius Longinus has reduced the entire machinery of Roman popular justice to a single letter: V for *uti rogas*, "as you propose," the affirmative ballot in a legislative assembly. The reverse shows a citizen in the act of voting, dropping his tablet into the wicker *cista*, while the obverse carries the veiled head of Vesta, balanced by a small cup. None of this is decoration.
The moneyer is advertising his ancestor L. Cassius Longinus Ravilla, the stern tribune of 137 BC who carried the *lex Cassia tabellaria* extending the secret ballot to capital trials before the people, and who in 113 BC presided over the notorious court that condemned three Vestal Virgins for *incestum*, a verdict so severe that "a Cassian judge" became Roman shorthand for harshness. The Vestal and the ballot belong together: they commemorate the same prosecutor. To strike this design in 60 BC, the year of the so-called First Triumvirate, was to plant a flag for the populist, ballot-reforming, priest-prosecuting wing of the Cassii, a family that within sixteen years would supply the lead dagger on the Ides of March. The coin says, plainly, that a Cassius is willing to put a Vestal on trial and trust the people's vote.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- 60 BC
- Authority
- L. Cassius Longinus
- Reverse
- voter standing left, dropping a tablet inscribed V into a cista