Few coins in the entire Roman series are as blunt as this one. Struck by Marcus Junius Brutus at a military mint shuffling between Asia Minor and northern Greece in the late summer or autumn of 42 BC, the EID MAR denarius (Crawford 508/3) advertises a political murder with the cool precision of a legal brief: two daggers, a *pileus* (the felt cap given to a freed slave), and the date, the Ides of March. The obverse compounds the offense. Brutus, who had spent years cultivating descent from the Brutus who expelled the Tarquins and from Servilius Ahala who cut down the would-be tyrant Spurius Maelius, places his own bare head on Roman silver, the very privilege Caesar had claimed in his last months and which had helped get him killed. The legend, naming the moneyer L.
Plaetorius Cestianus and Brutus as *imperator*, is administrative; the argument is in the pictures. Kill the tyrant, free the citizen, and put the assassins' faces on the coin that pays the legions hired to defend the deed. By the time most of these denarii left the mint, the case was already being decided at Philippi, where Brutus would fall on his sword and the Republic he had killed Caesar to restore would die with him. The coin survived to become, in Cassius Dio's hands a couple of centuries later, evidence of just how shameless Brutus had been; today it is among the most coveted objects in numismatics, which is its own commentary on whose memory won.
- Mint
- Military mint traveling with Brutus and Cassius in western Asia Minor or northern Greece
- Struck
- Late summer-autumn 42 BC
- Authority
- Marcus Junius Brutus
- Reverse
- Pileus (cap of liberty) between two daggers pointing downward