On the eve of Actium, Mark Antony was running out of silver and time, and so he struck. The legionary denarii rolled out of Patrae in industrial quantities through the autumn and winter of 32 BC, each one a portable loyalty oath: a praetorian galley cutting right across the obverse, oars bristling, with ANT AVG above and III VIR R P C below reminding the bearer that this man was still, technically, one of the three commissioners for the restoration of the Republic. The reverse named the unit, here LEG XVIIII, flanked by an aquila and two signa, the sacred standards around which a Roman soldier organized his entire moral universe. Antony was paying his army in coin that flattered them, naming legion by legion down the line from the praetorian cohorts to the high twenties, and the silver was visibly debased to stretch the bullion across tens of thousands of fists.
Octavian's propagandists would later sneer that Antony had gone Eastern, gone soft, gone Cleopatra's, but the coinage tells a blunter story: a Roman general buying a Roman war with Roman iconography, and not quite enough metal to go around. The denarii outlived the cause. Because the silver was poor, Gresham's law kept them in circulation for centuries; legionary denarii of LEG XIX and its siblings turn up worn smooth in hoards closed under Marcus Aurelius and even Septimius Severus, still passing from hand to hand long after everyone had agreed that Actium was Augustus's victory and Antony's name a cautionary tale.
- Mint
- Patrae
- Struck
- Autumn 32-spring 31 BC
- Authority
- Mark Antony
- Reverse
- Aquila between two signa