A provincial governor in Africa, cornered by the political earthquake of 43 BC, reached for the only authority left to him: the gods. Quintus Cornuficius, holder of Africa Vetus and one of the last men in the western Mediterranean still loyal to the Senate after the formation of the Triumvirate, struck this denarius (Crawford 509/3) at a North African mint, probably Utica, in the spring of 42 BC. The reverse legend Q CORNVFICI AVGVR IMP names him with the two titles that mattered, augur and imperator, and shows him veiled in priestly robes, lituus in hand, being crowned by Juno Sospita in her goat skin with shield, spear, and the sacred crow on her shoulder, an unmistakable summons to Lanuvium and the old Latin religion. Africa herself, in her elephant scalp, looks out from the obverse with two spears beside her, the personification of the province he was preparing to defend. The message is layered and unsubtle: a legitimate Roman magistrate, sanctioned by augural college and Italian goddess alike, standing against the men who had outlawed Cicero and were dividing the Republic among themselves.
The coin paid the troops who lost. Within months Cornuficius was dead, defeated in the field by T. Sextius, the Triumvirs' man in Africa Nova, who had been turned loose to swallow his neighbor's province. Sources hostile and friendly agree he refused to flee and was killed fighting, an augur to the end. The Juno Sospita who crowns him on the reverse had crowned no one in Roman coinage quite this way before, and the borrowing of her Lanuvine iconography, familiar from the denarii of L. Procilius and L. Roscius Fabatus a generation earlier, was a deliberate appeal to the religious heart of Latium against the new military order rising in Italy. The denarius survives in small numbers, mostly from African finds. It is the self portrait of a man who chose to lose correctly rather than win on the Triumvirs' terms.
- Mint
- North African mint, possibly Utica
- Struck
- Spring-early summer 42 BC
- Authority
- Quintus Cornuficius
- Reverse
- Quintus Cornuficius veiled and in priestly robes standing facing, holding lituus in right hand, crowned with wreath by Juno Sospita standing left wearing goat-skin headdress and holding shield and spear, with a crow perched on her shoulder