In the Wake of Sulla
- sulla80
- 10 hours ago
- 6 min read
Today's coin of interest takes us to the late summer of 75 BC. Sulla had been dead for three years. His dictatorship - brutal, efficient, and constitutionally unprecedented - had reshaped Rome in ways that could not easily be unmade. He had proscribed his enemies, murdered perhaps four thousand citizens, stripped the tribunate of its powers, flooded the Senate with his own loyalists, and then, surprisingly, retired. He died of natural causes in 78 BC, leaving behind a Rome that was technically restored to republican order but whose political fabric had been permanently torn.
Tensions in Rome
In Spain, the renegade general Quintus Sertorius had been fighting a guerrilla campaign against Roman authority for years, commanding Iberian tribes and Roman exiles alike. He established what amounted to a rival Roman state in the west. Pompey, who had been dispatched to crush him, was struggling.
In the east, Mithridates of Pontus, whom Sulla had defeated but never destroyed, was quietly rebuilding his strength. And across the Mediterranean, piracy had reached a level of crisis that threatened Rome's grain supply and her pride. The seas that Rome called mare nostrum, "our sea", were controlled by no one. A young Julius Caesar would be captured by Cilician pirates the following year and held for ransom, when he returned he had them crucified.
At home, the popular factions were pushing back against Sulla's constitutional settlement. The tribunes, champions of the plebeian class, whose powers Sulla had diminished, agitated for restoration. The Populares, the reform-minded political tendency that traced its lineage through the Gracchi and Marius, were reasserting themselves against the Optimates, the conservative senatorial oligarchy that Sulla had empowered. Rome was not at war with itself, but it was a city of tensions and competing visions of what it meant to be Roman.
The Moneyer
Gaius Egnatius, son of Gnaeus, grandson of Gnaeus, surnamed Maxsumus, tresviri monetales was one of the three the mint magistrates. The tresviri monetales, sometimes called the triumviri aere argento auro flando feriundo - "three men for casting and striking bronze, silver and gold" - were junior magistrates in the early stages of a political career. The position was not glamorous, but it carried with it an important privilege: the power to decide what appeared on the coinage of Rome.
In a world without any mass communication beyond the spoken word and the public monument, coins were the social media of ancient Rome. They passed through every hand in the empire, from senators to slaves, from Rome to the furthest frontier. The moneyers of the late Republic used this platform as advertisements for their political campaign and promoting themselves and the accomplishments of their illustrious family members.
Of Egnatius Maxsumus, little is known. The gens Egnatia was a plebeian family of equestrian rank, enrolled in the Stellatine voting tribe and most probably of Samnite origins - their roots likely lay in the hill country of central Italy, among the Oscan-speaking peoples whom Rome had absorbed after the ferocious Samnite Wars of the fourth and third centuries BC. A Gellius Egnatius was the leader of the Samnites in the 3rd War with Rome in 296 BC, and defeated a year later.
Whilst this campaign (Roman destruction of the farmland and towns) was going on in Samnium - whoever may have been the commander - a very serious war against Rome was being organised in Etruria, in which many nations were to take part. The chief organiser was Gellius Egnatius, a Samnite.
-Livy, History of Rome, 10.18.1-2A bilingual milestone, inscribed in both Latin and Greek, was discovered in 1974 in the sandy alluvium of the Gallikos river near Thessalonica, it records a Gnaeus Egnatius, son of Gaius, proconsul of Macedonia, was in all probability a direct descendant of the proconsul Gnaeus Egnatius who built the Via Egnatia about 70 years earlier. The Via Egnatia started construction around 146–145 BC. Our moneyer likely a descendant of this proconsul.
The family were respectable, prosperous, and obscure. No further record of Gaius Egnatius Maxsumus survives in the ancient sources. He served his term as mint magistrate, struck his coins, and vanished from history.
The Coin
Cn. Egnatius Maximus, Ca. 76/75 BC. Silver Denarius (3.67 g) 20 mm.
Obv: Draped bust of Libertas rioght, wearing diadem; pileus and MAXSVMVS downwards behind
Rev: Roma and Venus standing facing, each holding staff in right hand, while Roma holds sword in left hand and places foot on wolf's head, and Venus has Cupid about to alight on her shoulder; rudder standing on prow to outer left & right, C·EGNATIVS·CN·F below, CN·N upwards to r., M (control letter) in l. field.
Ref: S-326; RRC 391/3; CRR 787. NGC Choice VF; Strike: 4/5, Ssurface: 5/5. Pleasing old cabinet toning. Ex The Peter Preovolos Collection.
The obverse of his denarius carries the diademed, draped bust of Libertas - the goddess of freedom - facing right. Behind her head, partly visible on well-struck examples, is the pileus, the felt cap that in Roman culture was the symbol of the freed slave: given to a man upon his manumission, it announced to the world that he was free. Above or behind this floats the cognomen MAXSVMVS, the moneyer's family nickname descending behind Libertas.
The reverse shows two female figures standing, facing forward, separated and flanked by a pair of rudders mounted on the prows of ships. On the left stands Roma, helmeted and martial, holding a staff and a sword, her left foot resting with sovereign authority on the head of a wolf. On the right stands Venus, diademed and serene, holding her own staff, while the small winged figure of Cupid descends toward her shoulder. The moneyer's full filiation runs in the exergue below: C· EGNATIVS · CN · F · CN · N (Gaius Egnatius, son of Gnaeus) . On the right field, CN · N (grandson of Gnaeus) ascends vertically, completing the formula. It is an unusually complete statement of family lineage for a Roman coin.
Roma's foot on the wolf is not an act of conquest but of sovereignty. The she-wolf was the founding myth of Rome, the creature that had suckled Romulus and Remus when they were abandoned on the riverbank: by standing over it, Roma declares herself mistress of the city's entire history.
Venus beside was the divine mother of Aeneas, the Trojan hero from whom the Roman people traced their descent. Together, Roma and Venus encompass Rome's military strength and divine ancestry. And the rudders on their prows, those slightly enigmatic objects framing the scene on either side, speak to naval power at a moment when the Mediterranean was lawless with pirates.
More Turbulence
The turbulence of late Roman republic continued in the following years: In 73 BC, a Thracian gladiator named Spartacus led a slave revolt that would grow to perhaps one hundred thousand fighters before being crushed by Marcus Crassus. The legions marching north crucified six thousand slaves lining the Appian Way from Capua to Rome.
In 70 BC, Pompey and Crassus together dismantled Sulla's constitutional settlement, restoring the tribunate's powers and beginning the long unraveling of the Optimate order. In 67 BC, Pompey was granted his extraordinary command against the pirates - the very pirates whose shadow perhaps falls across those ship-prow rudders on the reverse of this coin - and swept the Mediterranean clear in a mere three months, a feat of military organisation that made him the most celebrated man in Rome. The third asnd final war with Mithridates would leave Rome the dominant force in the Mediterranean.
Julius Caesar, spared by Sulla, barely twenty-five when this coin was struck, was beginning his political career. Cicero, who had been serving his quaestorship in Sicily in 75 BC - the very year of this coin - was laying the foundations of a career that would make him Rome's greatest advocate.
References:
Byron Waldron, Fabius Maximus Rullianus and the capture of Gavius Pontius: Livy’s book 11 and the last years of the Third Samnite War, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, Volume 68, Issue 3, December 2025, Pages 408–421.
Livy, History of Rome, trans. Rev. Canon Roberts (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1912), 10.18.1–2, Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University.
Rhomiopoulou, Katerina. "Un Nouveau Milliaire De La via Egnatia", pp.813-816 - BCH XCVIII-1974, II Chroniques Et Rapports.
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