Roman Coins and Roman History pg3

The earliest bronze coins had featured deities such as Janus, Mercury, and Apollo. The tresviri monetales patriotically personified Rome and Victory on silver coins issued during the Punic wars and added the Dioscuri to the deities included thereon; two- and four-horse chariots figured more or less prominently on the coins as well. But the tresviri monetales also began adding magistrates' marks, symbols, monograms, abbreviated names, and ultimately, by around 150 B.C., full names, which excluded the ROMA that had been there for so long. Clearly the age of the individual political persona was at hand, and shortly thereafter the tresviri began depicting historical incidents involving their ancestors and services rendered by them. In the age of revolution such historical allusions took on symbolic contemporary significance, especially when allies and followers of powerful generals like Sulla, Pompey, and Julius Caesar were in charge of the mint and unabashedly using coins as instruments of political propaganda. Personal references had replaced the civic legend and patriotic designs on coins just as soldiers swore allegiance to generals rather than to Rome. In 44 B.C. Caesar took the ultimate step and placed a portrait of himself on the silver denarius, the first living Roman ever to do so. It is this coin (no. 60) that breaks with the numismatic past once and for all and establishes a new precedent, which becomes the norm in the Roman empire.

Caesar's bold step had, of course, its precedent in Hellenistic coinage. Alexander the Great's successors had replaced portraits of deities with that of him on the coinage they issued, thereby affirming his deification. Soon it became standard minting procedure for Hellenistic monarchs to portray themselves on their coinage even while still alive, as we have seen in the previous essay and on coins nos. 43, 44, 46, 47, 49-54, 56, and 58. The lesson of the Hellenistic world was not lost on either Caesar or his adherents, and shortly after his death he was apotheosized and became divus Julius, "divine Julius," as the inscription on coin no. 67 attests. And as Alexander's exploits had transformed the Greek world, so Caesar's did the Roman. Thus when the biographer Plutarch (fl. A.D. 100) compiled his parallel lives of famous Greeks and Romans, he quite naturally paired Alexander and Julius Caesar. Caesar did not live long enough to implement his vision of a new Roman state, but by depicting himself on his coins in the veristic or realistic style as an experienced, wise, and elder statesman he was sending a message. It was left to his adopted heir, after another civil war, to deliver that message in its fullest form, namely, the establishment of the Roman empire.

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