In the spring of 43 BC, a nineteen year old with no military record to speak of needed to look like a Caesar, and this denarius (Crawford 482/1) is one of his earliest attempts to manage the trick. Struck at a military mint moving with Octavian through Italy or Cisalpine Gaul, the coin places on its obverse a head of Venus, ancestress of the Julian house, but the features have shifted: the brow, the knot of hair, the cast of the face read as Apollo, the god Octavian was already cultivating as his personal patron. On the reverse stands a trophy of Gallic arms, chariot, shield, spears, and the unmistakable curve of a *carnyx*, the Gallic war horn, beneath the legends CAESAR and IMP. The trophy is not Octavian's.
It belongs to the *Bellum Gallicum* of his adoptive father, fought a decade and a half earlier, and the boy is borrowing it wholesale, claiming the title *imperator* and the prestige of conquests he had no part in. The audience for this message was the legions he was trying to keep loyal during the Mutina campaign against Antony, soldiers who had served the dictator and might be persuaded to serve his heir. Within eighteen months he would march on Rome, force his consulship, and join the triumvirate that proscribed Cicero. The denarius shows the apprenticeship: a divine pedigree on one side, someone else's victory on the other, and a name that was doing all the work.
- Mint
- Military mint traveling with Octavian in Italy or Cisalpine Gaul
- Struck
- Spring 43 BC
- Authority
- Octavian
- Reverse
- Trophy of Gallic arms with chariot at base on left, shield, two spears and carnyx on right