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A Tale of Two Eagles

  • Writer: sulla80
    sulla80
  • 7 hours ago
  • 5 min read

A billon tetradrachm of the empress Tranquillina (Alexandria, AD 243/4) and a silver 5 lire of Vittorio Emanuele III (Rome, 1926) both showing a frontal eagle: wings spread and drooping, head turned to the side, the whole bird filling the field. On one the bird is perched on a wreath, on the other on a bundle of rods. One is heavy, debased silver, struck in Egypt under Roman rule. The other is good silver from Mussolini's Rome, dated 1926. The are minted nearly seventeen centuries apart. And yet the birds are recognizably the same bird. It turns out that this is not just coincidence, and the two coins are bound together by a symbol, by rulers who were each partly figureheads, and, by a single city.


The Anceint Coin

The ancient piece is a billon tetradrachm of Furia Sabinia Tranquillina. It was struck at Alexandria. The date sits in the field as two Greek letters, L–Z: regnal year 7 of Gordian III. Her draped bust fills the obverse. On the reverse the eagle stands facing, head right, wings spread, perched on a wreath.

Roman Provincial, Egypt, Alexandria, Tranquillina (Augusta, 241-244), BI Tetradrachm ( 12.66g, 22mm ), dated RY 7 of Gordian III (243/4).

Obv: ϹΑΒ ΤΡΑΝΚΥΛΛЄΙΝΑ ϹЄΒ, diademed and draped bust right.

Rev: L - Ζ (date), eagle standing facing, head right, spreading wings and holding wreath in talons.

Ref: RPC VII.2 3885; Dattari (Savio) 4851; Emmett 3444.7.


Traquillina's father was Gaius Furius Sabinius Aquila Timesitheus, the Praetorian Prefect. He ran the Roman state on behalf of a teenager. Gordian III had reached the throne in 238 at the age of thirteen. He was the last one alive after a year that produced six emperors. By 241 Timesitheus commanded the Praetorian Guard. In May of 241, the sixteen-year-old emperor married the prefect's daughter. Tranquillina became Augusta. The marriage was a transaction that bound the boy on the throne to the man who held the power.


Timesitheus marched east against the Sasanian king Shapur I. The emperor went with him. Tranquillina went too. In 243 the prefect died. There is debate about how - whether illness or poison. His replacement was an ambitious officer named Philip, soon to be "the Arab". By February 244 Gordian was dead at nineteen. How he died is genuinely disputed. The Sasanian King Shapur, claims on his monument, the Res Gestae Divi Saporis, that the young emperor fell in battle at Misiche on the Euphrates. The Roman sources insist he was murdered at Philips instigation. The Roman version is passed down by the Historia Augusta, a source worth questioing. Either way, Philip became emperor, Tranquillina vanished, and she left no children behind.


The Eagle

The bird on her coin with spread wings is the badge of the Ptolemies. Ptolemy I Soter adopted it when he carved Egypt out of Alexander's empire. Rome annexed Egypt in 30 BC and kept the province on a closed currency. The Alexandrian mint struck tetradrachms dated by the emperor's regnal year.


The eagle was Jupiter's, as is the thunderbolt that the bird stands on. It was also the legions'. The silver aquila was the soul of a Roman legion, and to lose one was a catastrophe. And it was the bird of apotheosis. At an emperor's funeral, an eagle was released from the pyre to carry his soul up to the gods. 

The Modern Coin

This brings us to the silver 5 lire "Aquilotto" of Vittorio Emanuele III struck ion 1926. Rome struck this coin from 1926 to 1935 in .835 silver. Giuseppe Romagnoli designed it; Attilio Motti cut the dies. The king's bare head fills the obverse. The reverse holds an eagle with spread wings, perched on a large fascio littorio (the lictor's fasces) with the value L • 5 below.


The imagery was intyentional. Mussolini's regime held that Fascist Italy was the living heir of ancient Rome. The regime mined the classical past for emblems, and scholars have catalogued the habit at length. The fasces was a bundle of rods bound around an axe. Lictors carried it before a magistrate as the sign of imperium, the power to command and to punish. Fascism took its name this emblem. The eagle was Jupiter's and the legions'.


The eagle perches on the fasces, the dynasty's bird stands on the party's emblem. The edge is lettered FERT, the old motto of the House of Savoy. Although there are other more elaborate explanations, the plain-Latin "he endures" reading is generally considered more plausible, though even that is an inference. The coin marries crown and party. That is exactly what the regime was: a Fascist dictatorship running, for two decades, under a king who had handed it the keys.


Two coins, two figureheads

Here is the parallel that earns the comparison. On both coins, the named sovereign shares the stage with the real power. Tranquillina's portrait from as regime her father ran. Vittorio Emanuele III was a front of a grander and more culpable kind. He invited Mussolini to power in 1922. He watched his own authority hollow out and did little. He signed the regime's worst acts, the racial laws of 1938 among them. He dismissed the dictator only in 1943, when the war was already lost. The Italians called him il Re soldato, the Soldier King. A more biting name stuck too: the Little King. The 1946 referendum abolished the monarchy. He abdicated and went into exile.


Alexandria, twice

Vittorio Emanuele III was also a serious coin collector and the honorary president of the Italian Numismatic Society. He compiled a twenty-volume catalogue, the Corpus Nummorum Italicorum, between 1910 and 1943. Which could at least partially explain why he wasn't paying attention to Mussolini.


And we have one more coincidence that feels almost contrived, but true: Tranquillina's eagle was struck at Alexandria in AD 243/244. Victor Emmanule III died at Alexandria in 1947. He died in exile, of pulmonary congestion, on the 28th of December. He was buried there, behind the altar of St. Catherine's Cathedral, until his remains came home to Italy in 2017. Two eagles, connected to two rulers with little real authority, both connected to Alexandria, seventeen centuries apart.


References


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