The Second Triumvirate in Twenty Two Coins

Three Men to Restore the Republic

The lex Titia, carried through the plebeian assembly by the tribune Publius Titius on 27 November 43 BCE, created what we call the Second Triumvirate: Mark Antony, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, and Octavian, granted sweeping powers for five years as tresviri rei publicae constituendae (IIIVIR RPC), "three men to restore the Republic". The commission was renewed, somewhat behind schedule, at Tarentum in 37 BCE for a further five years, through the end of 33.

Their restoration began with proscriptions that eliminated political enemies and filled their war chest, and continued with campaigns against the assassins of Caesar, the self-styled Liberators Brutus and Cassius, and against their ally Sextus Pompey. Rather than restoring the Republic, the triumvirs ended by fighting one another. Octavian won, and reformed the Republic into the Principate, with himself as Augustus, princeps, the "first citizen", a title for a monarchy that didn't clash with the republic's no-kings history.

The twenty coins that follow tell that story from end to end, and the reader who wants a single thread need only watch the legends. III VIR R P C, the constitutional claim, appears on nearly every coin, mutates to III VIR ITER, and then vanishes. In its place rises a different formula: DIVI F, son of a god, and at last simply CAESARI AVGVSTO.

The legends on these 20 coins tell the story of the transition from Republic to Empire.

Act One. The Promise, 43 BCE

The story opens weeks before the Triumvirate exists. In late May 43, Antony, was defeated at Mutina and declared a public enemy. He crossed the Alps and joined forces with Lepidus, governor of Transalpine Gaul and, importantly, pontifex maximus. Their joint denarius advertises sacred credentials: Antony announces his augurate with the lituus (the augur’s curved staff), capis (ritual jug), and raven, and Lepidus answers with the simpulum, aspergillum, securis, and apex, implements of the pontificate. Two outlaws present themselves as guardians of Roman religion.

This coin was first shared in an earlier post; it is an exceedingly rare issue from the pivotal moment just before the three-man pact was struck. Crawford placed the mint in Cisalpine Gaul; Woytek has shown that the whole 489 series belongs to Transalpine Gaul, struck from early summer 43 after the two commanders joined forces.

Mark Antony and M. Aemilius Lepidus. Late spring 43 BCE. AR Denarius (18 mm, 3.71 g). Military mint traveling with Antony and Lepidus in Transalpine Gaul.

Obv: M ANTON IMP, lituus, capis, and raven

Rev: M LEPID IMP, simpulum, aspergillum, securis, and apex

Ref: Crawford 489/2; Sydenham 1156; RSC 2; Woytek, Arma et Nummi, pp. 555-558 (Transalpine Gaul, contra Crawford)

A quinarius of the same series drops Lepidus. Antony appears alone with the same augural emblems, Victory crowning a trophy on the reverse, and the omission is usually taken to show who the senior partner really was.

Mark Antony. 43-42 BCE. AR Quinarius (13.1 mm, 1.77 g). Mint in Transalpine Gaul.

Obv: M ANT (ligate) IMP, lituus, capis, and raven

Rev: Victory standing right, crowning trophy

Ref: Crawford 489/4; Sydenham 1159; CRI 121; RSC 82; RBW 1711; Woytek, Arma et Nummi, p. 558

Notes: Countermark on obverse, otherwise about Very Fine. Ex E. E. Clain-Stefanelli Collection; ex NAC 100, 29 May 2017, lot 1636

The lion quinarius is unprecedented in Roman coinage: the face of a living Roman’s wife. Victory here wears the features of Fulvia, Antony’s formidable third wife, a decade before dynastic portraiture became routine. By the time it was struck the lex Titia had passed, and the obverse carries the new legend III VIR R P C.

The lion was Antony’s badge, read by Woytek as the Nemean lion of Hercules, from whom Antony claimed descent through a son of Hercules named Anton; one traditional reading of the numeral XLI sees Antony’s age, forty-one on 14 January 42 BCE. Woytek assigns these lion quinarii specifically to the newly founded colony of Lugdunum.

Mark Antony. 43-42 BCE. AR Quinarius (1.59 g). Lugdunum (Woytek; Transalpine Gaul, Crawford).

Obv: III VIR R P C, winged bust of Victory right, with the features of Fulvia

Rev: ANTONI IMP, lion walking right; in field, A XLI

Ref: Crawford 489/6; Woytek, Arma et Nummi, pp. 558-560

Act Two. The Pursuit, 42 BCE

With Italy secured and the proscription lists closed, the triumvirs turned east against Brutus and Cassius. The campaign year’s coinage shows the two future rivals already coining different claims. Antony’s issues put Sol, the sun god, on the reverse, radiate in a distyle temple on one type and as a bare radiate head on the other. Crawford read Sol as heralding "the imminence of a new age"; Woytek finds that too esoteric and reads Sol as Rome’s old pictorial shorthand for the East, the theater where the war had to be fought and the money spent. Keep that reading in mind; it will return on a coin struck in Athens four years later.

Mark Antony. 42 BCE. AR Denarius (17 mm, 3.74 g, 3h). Military mint moving with Antony in Italy(?).

Obv: M ANTONI IMP, bare head of Mark Antony right

Rev: III VIR R P C, distyle temple within which radiate and draped bust of Sol set on medallion

Ref: Crawford 496/1; Sydenham 1168; RBW 1753; Babelon (Antonia) 34

Mark Antony. 42 BCE. AR Denarius (19.5 mm, 3.74 g). Military mint moving with Antony in Italy(?).

Obv: Head of Mark Antony right, with light beard; lituus behind

Rev: M ANTONIVS III VIR R P C, radiate head of Sol right

Ref: Crawford 496/2; RBW 1754; Woytek, Arma et Nummi, p. 558

Octavian’s answer looks backward rather than eastward. In January 42 the Senate consecrated Julius Caesar as a god, and within weeks Octavian’s military mint was striking the curule chair, the magistrate’s ivory seat of office, surmounted by a wreath and inscribed CAESAR DIC PER, dictator perpetuo, the very title that had cost Caesar his life. Where Antony points to the war, Octavian points to the inheritance.

Octavian. Spring-summer 42 BCE. AR Denarius (18.2 mm, 3.63 g, 6h). Military mint moving with Octavian in Italy.

Obv: CAESAR III VIR R P C, bare head of Octavian right, with slight beard

Rev: Wreath set on curule chair inscribed CAESAR DIC PER

Ref: Crawford 497/2a; Sydenham 1322; RBW 1756; Babelon (Julia) 89

In October 42 the 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 victors divided the world: Antony the East, Octavian the West and Italy, Lepidus, in time, Africa.

Act Three. The Dialogue of Power, 41 to 39 BCE

For the next decade the two men argued through images, what Robert Newman has called a dialogue of power in the coinage of Antony and Octavian. The argument turned violent almost immediately. Octavian’s confiscations of Italian land for Caesar’s veterans provoked the Perusine War (41 to 40 BCE), in which Antony’s brother Lucius Antonius and his wife Fulvia raised Italy in Antony’s name while Antony was in the East. Octavian starved Perusia (modern Perugia) into surrender in early 40.

The ancient writers say he spared Lucius but punished many supporters; Suetonius even reports the notorious and much debated story that hundreds of prisoners were slaughtered "like sacrificial victims" at the altar of the deified Julius on the Ides of March. Fulvia died soon after in Greece, and her death, conveniently for everyone, cleared the way for reconciliation.

Octavian’s coinage of these years works relentlessly on his standing in Italy. A denarius with his propraetor Balbus, the first Spaniard to reach the consulship, and another with the moneyer Q. Salvius, carry his head and his titles through the camps.

Octavian, with L. Cornelius Balbus. 41 BCE. AR Denarius (17 mm, 3.30 g). Mint moving with Octavian.

Obv: C CAESAR III VIR R P C, head of Octavian right

Rev: BALBVS PRO PR, club

Ref: Crawford 518/1; Sydenham 1325a; CRI 298; RSC 417; RBW 1802; Babelon (Julia) 91, (Cornelia) 78

The equestrian statue denarius is the boldest of the group. The Senate had voted Octavian, then nineteen, an equestrian statue on the Rostra in January 43, an honor Velleius Paterculus says had fallen in three hundred years only to Sulla, Pompey, and Caesar. By putting the statue on the reverse of a coin that carries his own head on the obverse, Octavian became the first living Roman to appear on both faces of the same coin.

"The senate honoured him with an equestrian statue, which is still standing upon the rostra and testifies to his years by its inscription. This is an honour which in three hundred years had fallen to the lot of Lucius Sulla, Gnaeus Pompeius, and Gaius Caesar, and to these alone." 
-Velleius Paterculus, Roman History 2.61

Octavian. 41 BCE. AR Denarius (19.5 mm, 3.56 g). Mint moving with Octavian.

Obv: C CAESAR III VIR R P C, bearded head of Octavian right

Rev: POPVL IVSSV, equestrian statue of Octavian left, right hand raised

Ref: Crawford 518/2

Antony’s eastern mints answered with the two rivals face to face on a single flan, a portrait of an alliance held together by symmetry. The issue signed by M. Barbatius Pollio, Antony’s quaestor pro praetore (the Q P of the legend, his deputy for finance), stacks the titles in careful balance: Antony is imperator, augur, and triumvir; Octavian answers as imperator, pontifex, and triumvir. Equal billing, although portrait size does seem to imply that one is more senior.

Mark Antony and Octavian, with M. Barbatius Pollio, quaestor pro praetore. 41 BCE. AR Denarius. Military mint moving with Antony (Ephesus?).

Obv: M ANT IMP AVG III VIR R P C M BARBAT Q P, bare head of Mark Antony right

Rev: CAESAR IMP PONT III VIR R P C, bare head of Octavian right

Ref: Crawford 517/2; Sydenham 1181; RBW 1798

Notes: banker’s mark on reverse

A second two-headed denarius, unsigned and probably struck farther east, repeats the message. The graffiti on this coin probably not random - a cut across Antony's neck that either predicts or reports the end of Antony.

Mark Antony and Octavian. 41 BCE. AR Denarius (22 mm, 2.40 g). Mint moving with Antony, probably in the East (Syria?).

Obv: M ANTON IMP AVG III VIR R P C, head of Antony right

Rev: CAESAR IMP III VIR R P C, head of Octavian right, slightly bearded

Ref: Crawford 528/3; Sydenham 1194; CRI 261a; RSC 2; Babelon (Antonia) 40

Octavian, with Q. Salvius. Early 40 BCE. AR Denarius (18 mm, 2.64 g, 1h). Military mint traveling with Octavian in Italy.

Obv: C CAESAR III VIR R P C, bare head of Octavian right, with slight beard

Rev: Q SALVIVS IMP COS DESIG, winged thunderbolt

Ref: Crawford 523/1a; CRI 300; Sydenham 1326b; RSC 514; RBW 1808

The Treaty of Brundisium, September 40 BCE, patched the alliance and sealed it the Roman way, with a marriage. Antony took Octavian’s sister Octavia, and the mint of Ephesus celebrated the union on a cistophorus that pairs Antony in Dionysiac ivy with Octavia’s portrait above the cista mystica. She was the first living Roman woman to appear on coinage so prominently, the diplomatic answer to Fulvia’s Victory of five years before.

Mark Antony and Octavia. Summer-autumn 39 BCE. AR Cistophorus (27 mm, 11.58 g, 12h). Ephesus.

Obv: M ANTONIVS IMP COS DESIG ITER ET TERT, head of Antony right, wearing ivy wreath; lituus below; all within wreath of ivy and flowers

Rev: III VIR R P C, draped bust of Octavia right above cista mystica flanked by interlaced serpents

Ref: RPC I 2201; RSC 2

The marriage papered over a relationship that had already begun. Antony had summoned Cleopatra VII of Egypt to Tarsus in 41 to answer for her conduct during the civil war, followed her to Alexandria for the winter, and by 40 she had borne him twins.

The Concordia quinarius closes the act: the goddess of Harmony on one face, the clasped hands of ANTON and CAESAR on the other. This specimen carries an extraordinary piece of ancient commentary, graffiti scratched by some early hand: a dagger, and cuts across one wrist of the clasped hands. Someone who lived with this coin annotated the propaganda with the ending. Given who won, one suspects it is Antony’s wrist being slashed.

Octavian and Mark Antony. Late 39 BCE. AR Quinarius (12 mm, 1.84 g, 12h). Military mint traveling with Octavian in Gaul.

Obv: III VIR R P C, veiled and diademed head of Concordia right

Rev: M ANTON C CAESAR, clasped right hands holding caduceus

Ref: Crawford 529/4b (without IMP in reverse legend); King 81

Notes: ancient graffiti on reverse, a dagger and cuts across the wrist

Act Four. The Gods Choose Sides, 38 to 36 BCE

From 38 the argument turns theological. Octavian pairs himself with his deified father: CAESAR DIVI F facing DIVOS IVLIVS, two heads, one living and one divine, on the bronze struck in southern Italy. This specimen is a contemporary imitation, struck by someone for whom the message evidently worked well enough to counterfeit.

Octavian and Divus Julius Caesar. 38 BCE. AE (28 mm, 8.84 g, 3h). Southern Italy. Contemporary imitation.

Obv: CAESAR DIVI F, bare head of Octavian right

Rev: DIVOS IVLIVS, wreathed head of Divus Julius Caesar right

Ref: cf. Crawford 535/1; RPC I 620

Notes: contemporary imitation of the official issue

Antony answers from Athens, his headquarters as master of the East, where he was minting to pay the armies of his Parthian war. The Sol of 42 returns, now on a coin whose two legends form a single unbroken sentence wrapping the flan: Marcus Antonius, son of Marcus, grandson of Marcus, augur, imperator for the third time, triumvir for the restoration of the Republic, consul designate for the second and third time. He stands veiled in the robes of an augur, holding the lituus, the same priestly claim as on the denarius of 43 that opened this story.

The IMP TERT hides a remarkable tale: all three acclamations rest on victories won by his legate Publius Ventidius Bassus, at the Cilician Gates (39 BCE) over the renegade Quintus Labienus, at the Amanus Pass (39 BCE) over the Parthian general Pharnapates, and at Gindarus (9 June 38 BCE), where the crown prince Pacorus fell. Under Roman practice the victories of a legate accrued to the commander who held the auspices, so Antony took the titles while remaining in Athens.

Ventidius received a triumph, celebrated in November 38, the only full Roman triumph over Parthia, and a perfect reversal of fortune: as a child in 89 BCE he had been paraded in his mother’s arms as a captive in the triumph of Pompeius Strabo after the fall of Asculum in the Social War.

Mark Antony. Summer 38 BCE. AR Denarius (19 mm, 3.77 g, 2h). Athens.

Obv: III VIR R P C COS DESIG ITER ET TERT, radiate head of Sol right

Rev: M ANTONIVS M F M N AVGVR IMP TERT, Antony standing right, veiled and wearing the robes of an augur, holding lituus

Ref: Crawford 533/2; Sydenham 1199; RBW 1820; Babelon (Antonia) 80

Notes: Woytek reads Sol as the badge of the East rather than Crawford’s "new age," and shows from a unique brockage that the Sol side is the technical obverse

Octavian’s reply of 37 reclaims the priestly ground with a reverse of pontifical and augural implements, under a new and telling obverse formula: IMP CAESAR DIVI F III VIR ITER, the renewed triumvirate of Tarentum joined to divine sonship.

Octavian. 37 BCE. AR Denarius (20 mm, 3.87 g, 8h). Southern or central Italian mint.

Obv: IMP CAESAR DIVI F III VIR ITER R P C, bare head of Octavian right

Rev: COS ITER ET TER DESIG, simpulum, aspergillum, capis, and lituus

Ref: Crawford 538/1; CRI 312; BMCRR Gaul 116; RSC 91

Notes: Very Fine; surface scratches. Crawford notes a disproportionate number of plated copies of this issue

The temple denarius of 36 completes the theology. The year saw Octavian, with Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa commanding the fleet, destroy Sextus Pompey at Naulochus (3 September) and strip Lepidus of his powers (22 September); the Triumvirate was now a pair. The reverse shows the temple of Divus Julius, not yet built, promised for the spot in the Forum where Caesar was cremated, DIVO IVL on the architrave and the sidus Iulium, the comet of July 44 that the crowd took for Caesar’s soul, blazing in the pediment.

Plaque next to Julius Caesar's altar in the Roman Forum. Image by Howard Hudson at English Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 3.0 license, via Wikimedia Commons 

Octavian dedicated the finished temple on 18 August 29 BCE. The bearded obverse portrait has been read as a mourning beard for Caesar, a campaign beard, or a bid to look older; on a coin this devoted to the deified father, mourning fits best. The issue is plausibly connected with Statilius Taurus and pay for the legions in Sicily.

"He died in the fifty-sixth year of his age, and was ranked amongst the Gods, not only by a formal decree, but in the belief of the vulgar. For during the first games which Augustus, his heir, consecrated to his memory, a comet blazed for seven days together... it was supposed to be the soul of Caesar, now received into heaven." 
(Suetonius, Divus Julius 88)

Octavian. 36 BCE. AR Denarius (17.5 mm, 3.25 g, 5h). Southern or central Italian mint.

Obv: IMP CAESAR DIVI F III VIR ITER R P C, bearded head of Octavian right

Rev: COS ITER ET TER DESIG, tetrastyle temple of Divus Julius, statue of Caesar as augur within, DIVO IVL on architrave, star in pediment, lit altar to left

Ref: Crawford 540/2; Sydenham 1338; RBW 1829

Notes: two banker’s marks right of Octavian’s ear

Act Five. The Verdict, 32 BCE and After

Cleopatra was both the treasury and the pretext of the final act. Antony returned to her for good after 37, and the Donations of Alexandria in 34, parceling out eastern realms to their children, handed Octavian his propaganda; in 32 Antony divorced Octavia, and Rome declared war not on him but on the queen. The coinage kept pace: denarii of 32 paired Antony's head with Cleopatra's (Crawford 543/1), the first time a foreign queen was portrayed and named on a Roman coin.

By 32 the dialogue was over and the fleets were gathering. Antony’s legionary coinage, struck at Patrae in the run-up to Actium, strips the argument to its essentials: a war galley, a legionary eagle between two standards, a legion’s name. No gods, no ancestors, no Republic to restore, just the instruments of force and the men who would wield them. The vast issue paid the army and navy that lost.

Praeneste, Relief commemorating the battle of Actium, ca. 31 BCE, Rome, Vatican Museums, Rabax63, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

This collection holds an official Legion XI denarius and a small mystery: a two-gram bronze imitation of a Legion XII ANTIQVAE denarius in remarkably official style, perhaps even cut by an engraver of official dies. Legion XII fought at Actium and was settled at Patrae afterward.

Mark Antony. Autumn 32-spring 31 BCE. AR Legionary Denarius. Patrae(?) mint.

Obv: ANT AVG III VIR R P C, praetorian galley right

Rev: LEG XI, legionary aquila between two signa

Ref: Crawford 544/25; CRI 362; Sydenham 1229

Contemporary imitation of a Mark Antony legionary denarius. 32-31 BCE(?). AE Denarius (16 x 14 mm, 2.00 g). Imitating the Patrae(?) mint.

Obv: [ANT AVG III VIR R P C], war galley right with triple ram prow and scepter tied with fillet

Rev: [LEG XII] ANTIQ[VAE], legionary aquila between two signa

Ref: cf. Crawford 544/9

Notes: style close to official dies; two comparable pieces in ACSearch listed as contemporary imitations

ACSearch: not my coin

Then the phrase disappears. When the coinage speaks again in this collection it is nearly a decade after Actium, and nobody claims to be restoring the Republic, because officially it has been restored. The moneyer Q. Rustius, advertising his family’s Antiate cult of the two Fortunae (the ram’s head finials recall the ram on his ancestor’s denarius, RRC 389), dedicates his reverse to the altar of Fortuna Redux, voted by the Senate for Octavian’s safe return from the East and consecrated at the Porta Capena on 12 October 19 BCE. The legend runs CAESARI AVGVSTO, EX S C: the Senate still speaks, but it speaks to Augustus.

"The Senate consecrated in honour of my return an altar to Fortuna Redux at the Porta Capena, near the temple of Honour and Virtue, on which it ordered the pontiffs and the Vestal virgins to perform a yearly sacrifice... and named the day, after my cognomen, the Augustalia." (Augustus, Res Gestae 11)

Augustus, with Q. Rustius, moneyer. Circa 19 BCE. AR Denarius (20 mm, 3.59 g, 10h). Rome.

Obv: Q RVSTIVS FORTVNAE, jugate busts of Fortuna Victrix, wearing round helmet, and Fortuna Felix, diademed; ANTIAT in exergue

Rev: CAESARI AVGVSTO, ornamented rectangular altar inscribed FOR RE; EX S C in exergue

Ref: RIC I 322

The last coin says the quiet part aloud. Struck at Colonia Patricia in Spain around 18 BCE, it shows the triumphal dress, the toga picta and tunica palmata, between eagle and wreath, and a ceremonial quadriga. The obverse legend sums up the whole story: S P Q R PARENT CONS SVO, "the Senate and the Roman people, to their father and protector." The commission of 43 BCE promised three men who would restore the Republic. Twenty-five years and twenty coins later, two of the three men were dead and the restoration was complete, in precisely the opposite of its advertised sense: a Republic restored into something that needed only one name.

Augustus. Circa 18 BCE. AR Denarius (17 mm, 3.80 g). Colonia Patricia.

Obv: S P Q R PARENT CONS SVO, toga picta over tunica palmata between aquila on left and wreath on right

Rev: CAESARI AVGVSTO, slow quadriga right with ornamented panels, surmounted by four miniature galloping horses

Ref: RIC I 97; RSC 79; CBN 1198

Notes: old cabinet tone, minor weakness, otherwise about Extremely Fine. From the collection of a Mentor

Coda. The Crocodile

At Colonia Nemausus (modern Nîmes) in southern Gaul, Augustus settled veterans of the Actium campaign, men who had fought on both sides, Octavian’s and Antony’s alike. The colony’s famous bronze pairs Augustus with Agrippa, the admiral who actually won Actium, wearing the rostral crown of naval victory, and answers them with a crocodile chained to a palm: Egypt captured.

It is hard not to see Antony in the crocodile, the Roman consul who ended as Cleopatra’s partner, chained beneath the victory wreath, and some have seen in the beast’s boat-like profile a sly echo of the galleys on his legionary denarii. His blood had the last laugh either way: through his daughters Antony became the ancestor of the emperors Caligula, Claudius, and Nero. The chained crocodile, not exactly a symbol of defeat, remains the emblem of Nîmes today, more than two thousand years after Actium.

Gaul, Colonia Nemausus. Augustus, with Agrippa. Struck circa 9/8-3 BCE. AE As (c. 12.5 g).

Obv: IMP above, DIVI F below, heads of Agrippa, wearing rostral crown and wreath, left, and Augustus, wearing oak wreath, right, back to back

Rev: COL NEM, crocodile right, chained to palm branch with short fronds; wreath with long ties above, palms below

Ref: RIC I 158 (group II); RPC I 524

Notes: later issue, lighter than the first emission of 28-27 BCE and without P P, added after Augustus accepted the title Pater Patriae

References

• Crawford, M. H. Roman Republican Coinage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974.

• Crawford, M. H. Roman Historical Coins. London, 1990.

• Newman, Robert. "A Dialogue of Power in the Coinage of Antony and Octavian (44-30 B.C.)." American Journal of Numismatics 2 (1990): 37-63.

• Rich, J. W., and J. H. C. Williams. "Leges et Ivra P. R. Restitvit: A New Aureus of Octavian and the Settlement of 28-27 BC." The Numismatic Chronicle 159 (1999): 169-213.

• 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.

• Metcalf, William E. "Review of Woytek, Arma et Nummi." Schweizerische numismatische Rundschau 85 (2006).

• Wallace-Hadrill, A. "Image and Authority in the Coinage of Augustus." Journal of Roman Studies 76 (1986): 66-87.

• Ancient sources: Velleius Paterculus 2.61; Suetonius, Divus Julius 88 and Divus Augustus 15; Appian, Civil Wars 5; Cassius Dio 46-49; Augustus, Res Gestae 11; Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 15.4 (Ventidius).

• Item C048, Lawrence University and Buerger Coin Collections, Wriston Art Center Galleries, Lawrence University, Appleton, WI.