Brutus in Lycia, 42 BCE
- sulla80
- 2 hours ago
- 9 min read
When I read about the men who presided over the end of the Roman Republic, Caesar, Pompey, Antony, Octavian, Cassius, Brutus, the same question echoes: who was good and who was bad? I want to choose sides with Brutus. He was on the side of liberty - was he not? His coins say so in so many words - protecting Rome from the tyranny of Caesar. And then there are the events in Lycia, which question the practice of sorting historical figures into good and bad.
The Path to Lycia
Immediately after Caesar's assassination (15 March 44 BCE), a compromise gave the conspirators amnesty. While the Senate were mixed in their support of Brutus and the conspirators, the people of Rome were not buying the "Liberation" story. Caesar's will, read publicly before the funeral gave 300 sesterces to every Roman citizen and his gardens across the Tiber left to the public. This added fuel to the public discontent. The Senate offered Brutus a safe path, a grain commission in Asia, and the minor province of Crete for 43. He never made it there.
In late August 44, Brutus sailed from Velia to Athens and began to raise funds and legions. Over the winter of 44 to 43 he took the Balkans and the treasury funds passing through Greece from the quaestors Antistius Vetus and Apuleius. He won over the legions in Macedonia and Illyricum. In February 43 the Senate, at Cicero's urging, retroactively legalized his actions, granting him Macedonia, Illyricum, and Greece.
In November 43 Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus formed the 2nd Triumvirate; the proscriptions followed, Cicero was killed in December, and Brutus and Cassius stood condemned as murderers under the lex Pedia. Brutus crossed to Asia and met Cassius at Smyrna around the turn of 43 to 42, where Cassius shared his war chest. They agreed that before facing the triumvirs in Europe they must secure their rear and their finances. Rhodes, the Lycian League, and Ariobarzanes of Cappadocia had refused to contribute money and soldiers, so Cassius sailed for Rhodes and Brutus marched south into Lycia.
In the spring of 42 BCE, Marcus Junius Brutus, the most famous of the assassins of Julius Caesar, was on the move through Lycia, the mountainous federation of cities on the southwestern coast of Asia Minor. A mint traveled with him to strike the coinage needed to pay his troops and supply them.
The Coin
The Republicans. Brutus. Spring-early summer 42 BCE. AR Denarius (17.5mm, 3.59 g, 12h). Military mint traveling with Brutus in Lycia.
Obv: Head of Libertas right
Rev: Lyre; quiver to left, laurel branch tied with fillet to right.
Ref: Crawford 501/1; CRI 199; Sydenham 1287; RSC 5; RBW 1767.
Notes: Toned, reverse struck slightly off center. Near VF. Ex Texas Wine Doctor Collection (Classical Numismatic Group Electronic Auction 475, 26 August 2020), lot 533; Coin Galleries Numismatic Review VIII, 5-6 (1967), no. E109; Coin Galleries Numismatic Review VII, 6 (1966), no. F85.
The Obverse: carries the head of Libertas, the goddess of Liberty, with her name spelled in the archaic manner LEIBERTAS, a deliberately old-fashioned touch that reinforces the key message of the "Liberators" that the murder of Caesar was essential to freedom from Kings/Tyrants.
The Reverse: names the issuer Q. CAEPIO BRVTVS PRO COS. Brutus used the name of his adoptive family, the Servilii Caepiones, and the title proconsul, a provincial governor holding military command, resting on the Senate’s grant of the eastern provinces to the conspirators in 43 BCE. The lyre, the quiver or plectrum beside it, and the laurel branch are all attributes of Apollo.
According to family legend, Apollo, the god of the Oracle at Delphi, had prompted Brutus’s ancestor Lucius Junius Brutus to expel the Tarquin kings and found the Republic in 509 BCE. Apollo adds to the overall message of a dynasty of tyrant-slayers fighting for the cause of liberty. The god is also relevant to the place where this coin was minted: Patara, in Lycia itself, housed one of the great oracles of Apollo.
Why Lycia: Silver.
By early 42 BCE the triumvirs Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus controlled Italy and the West, and war was certain. Brutus and Cassius, commanding the East, had perhaps twenty legions to feed and pay, and a legionary's wage alone came to hundreds of denarii a year, millions upon millions of coins that had to come from somewhere. They came from the cities of the East. Most paid. Rhodes and the Lycian League refused. So Cassius sailed for Rhodes, and Brutus marched into Lycia, where the League's chief city, Xanthos, shut its gates.
Events at Xanthos
Ancient accounts are reasonably consistent. Brutus was ruthless and showed some compassion. The accounts vary in how much they blame the victims for what happened.
Plutarch's version: writing about AD 100 to 120, he gives the most sympathetic account. In his telling the Xanthians, seized by "a dreadful and indescribable impulse to madness, which can be likened best to a passion for death," spread the fire through their own city, hurled themselves from the walls, and offered their throats to their fathers’ swords.
Brutus rides around the walls in tears, "with outstretched hands begging the Xanthians to spare and save their city," and offers his soldiers a reward for every Lycian saved alive. Only about 150, Plutarch says, survived.
Plutarch closes by recalling that the Xanthians’ own ancestors had burned their city rather than submit to the Persians five centuries earlier, "as though fulfilling a period set by fate."
Appian's version: writing in the mid second century AD, Appian tells a similar story. In his version the fire begins at the Roman siege engines during a desperate sortie and spreads to the city; the mass self-destruction follows, and Brutus, "moved to pity," again offers rewards for rescue. Appian, too, counts about 150 free survivors, and he draws the same moral about a people fated to destroy themselves, noting they had done likewise against Harpagus the Persian and against Alexander.
Cassius Dio's version: writing in the early third century AD, Cassius Dio is the least flattering. In his account Roman soldiers burst into the city on the heels of the failed sortie and threw fire into the houses themselves, "striking terror into those who witnessed what was being done." Only then, believing the city already taken, did the inhabitants burn the rest and kill one another. At Patara, the next city, Brutus set up an auction block beneath the walls and sold prominent Xanthian captives one at a time until the Patarans surrendered. Even Dio softens the ending: Brutus sold only a few, released the rest, and the Patarans concluded he was an honorable man.
All echo Brutus' own version from Plutarch, who quotes a letter to the Lycians: "The Xanthians, despising my benefactions, have made their country a grave of their despair; but the Patareans, entrusting themselves to me, are free." Whether or not the letter is authentic, it preserves the consistent story, which blamed the victims and advertised the victor’s clemency.
The campaign’s purpose, raising money, was never in doubt. Plutarch records the bill that Brutus collected from the rest of Lycia: 150 talents.
Modern Interpretation
The memory of the Liberators was fought over from the moment they died. Plutarch’s account rests heavily on memoirs written inside Brutus’s own circle, by the philosopher Publius Volumnius, the companion Empylus of Rhodes, and Brutus’s stepson Bibulus. The weeping Brutus and the rescue rewards descend from friends defending a dead man’s honor. (Rawson)
"While it would be unfair to claim that Plutarch did not pay attention to the historical context of the periods he studied, his approach was more often moralistic: he observed the lessons that could be learned from the past to draw up universal rules about virtue and vice" -Tempest, Kathryn. Brutus: The Noble Conspirator p.41
The fate of Xanthos is a lasting stain on Brutus’s record, an episode that even the most favorable ancient sources struggled to put in context. Plutarch blamed Brutus' lapses on the stress of war. (Tempest) The eastern fundraising efforts can be summed up as "highly successful if also singularly ruthless." (Volk)
M. L. Clarke traces how the noble Brutus of Plutarch, not the brutal auctioneer of Dio, became the Brutus of Shakespeare and of posterity: Shakespeare worked directly from North's 1579 translation of Plutarch. Clarke's survey of two thousand years of verdicts, from Dante's traitor gnawed in hell to the French Revolution's tyrant-slaying hero, suggests that "good or bad?" has never really been a question about Brutus; each age answers it about itself. His own verdict on the man is a single dry sentence: "Brutus was not the sort of man to think himself anything but in the right."
Lycian Silver
Bernhard Woytek’s Arma et Nummi (Vienna, 2003) is the standard study of Roman finance and coinage in the years 49 to 42 BCE. Woytek endorses Hyla Troxell’s demonstration that the reverse of this denarius speaks Lycian.
The object beside the lyre, long called a plectrum, is a cylindrical Lycian quiver
The large cithara is the hallmark reverse of the Lycian League’s own silver, the so-called kitharephoroi
laurel branch & ribbon copies League hemidrachms and alludes to the Lycian Apollo Patroos, whose cult statue at Patara held just such a branch.
The type was struck, in Troxell’s words, "in Lycia itself, presumably from the exacted tribute," a localization Woytek defends in detail. This coin's imagery represents the very people whose silver was used for these coins.
Plutarch pointedly contrasts the 8,500 talents Cassius wrung from Rhodes with a mere 150 for Brutus in Lycia. Woytek doesn't buy it: seizures at Patara and Myra are separately attested, so the 150 talents was only the closing fine on the League, not the total haul. The modest bill is part of the legend.
Crawford assigned this issue to the mint traveling with Brutus in 43 to 42 BCE; Sear places it in Lycia in the spring and early summer of 42, roughly the timing of the siege of Xanthos. Hollstein’s study of the Apollo types shows how carefully the imagery was chosen: Liberty on one face, the god of the tyrannicide legend on the other, struck from the proceeds of a sacked city.
Epilogue
In October 42 BCE the republican and triumviral armies met at Philippi in Macedonia. Cassius, misinformed after the first battle, killed himself; Brutus, defeated in the second, followed him on 23 October. The coinage of the Liberators stopped with them, which is one reason these issues fascinate collectors: each is a document from a cause that lasted only a few months after the coin was minted.
Provenance: This specimen comes with its own modern history as well. It can be traced through the Coin Galleries Numismatic Review sales of 1966 and 1967 and the Texas Wine Doctor Collection, sold by Classical Numismatic Group in 2020, a documented modern provenance of nearly sixty years.
Which returns me to the opening question. The obverse of this coin says LEIBERTAS; however, it is minted in silver extracted from Lycia and the destroyed city of Xanthos. A line from Hamilton fits this coin better than its writers knew:
Brutus died at Philippi, but his friends, then Plutarch, then Shakespeare told his story, and the martyred liberator they painted has reached us two thousand years later. So, good or bad? Before you answer, decide which liberty you mean: Republican liberty, or Xanthian.
And then there is this coin - Mark Anthony in Athens in the summer of 38. A coin that offers a sequel to the story of Brutus in Lycia that we could title - Mark Antony in Athens. But that is a story that will have to wait for another week.
References
Ancient: Plutarch, Life of Brutus 2, 24, 30-32; Appian, Civil Wars 4.60-82; Cassius Dio, Roman History 47.34; Herodotus 1.176; Valerius Maximus 1.5.7.
Clarke, M. L. The Noblest Roman: Marcus Brutus and His Reputation. London: Thames and Hudson, 1981.
Crawford, Michael H. Roman Republican Coinage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974. No. 501/1.
Hollstein, Wilhelm. "Apollo und Libertas in der Münzprägung des Brutus und Cassius." Jahrbuch für Numismatik und Geldgeschichte 44 (1994): 113-133.
Magie, David. Roman Rule in Asia Minor. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950.
Rawson, Elizabeth. "Cassius and Brutus: The Memory of the Liberators." In Past Perspectives, edited by I. S. Moxon, J. D. Smart, and A. J. Woodman, 101-119. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Sear, David R. The History and Coinage of the Roman Imperators 49-27 BC. London: Spink, 1998. No. 199.
Tempest, Kathryn. Brutus: The Noble Conspirator. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017.
Troxell, Hyla A. The Coinage of the Lycian League. Numismatic Notes and Monographs 162. New York: American Numismatic Society, 1982.
Volk, Katharina. Review of Tempest, Brutus: The Noble Conspirator. Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2018.01.40.
Woytek, Bernhard. Arma et Nummi: Forschungen zur römischen Finanzgeschichte und Münzprägung der Jahre 49 bis 42 v. Chr. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2003.
Crawford, M. H. (2012). Review of Arma et Nummi. Forschungen zur römischen Finanzgeschichte und Münzprägung der Jahre 49 bis 42 v. Chr. (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Phil.-hist. Kl., Denkschriften. 312; Veröffentlichungen der Numismatischen Kommission. 40.), by B. Woytek]. Gnomon, 84(4), 337–342.
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