DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.51762#0159
HISTORICAL ROMAN COINS
more than eighteen months, and the Caesarian types
would have lost much of their point. We may there-
fore accept De Salis’s attribution of these coins to the
year of Caesar’s death. The first was probably struck
before the fatal event. Caesar is represented with
veiled head as pontifex maximus. The portrait, though
not nearly so well executed as the head on the coins
of L. Aemilius Buca, another moneyer of the same
year, is more like the traditional Caesar. He wears
the laurel-wreath, the perpetual use of which was
granted to him by the State, much, says Suetonius,1
to his satisfaction, because his baldness exposed him
to the derision of his enemies. Venus is represented
on the coin as the ancestress of the Julian house ;
she is here the Venus Victrix whose name was Caesar’s
watchword at Pharsalus and Munda,2 and whom he
had represented on his signet-ring.3 On the second
coin the palm-branch and wreath show that the
type is agonistic ; the rider is a desuitor, and the con-
test that in which a horseman leaps from one horse to
another in full gallop. Suetonius records4 that nobilis-
simi iuvenes rode in such races at the Circensian games
celebrated by Caesar. As this performance by young
men of good position was something out of the common,
Macer may have thought it a suitable type for coins
1 Divus lulius, 45.
2 Appian b.c. ii. 68. 281 ; 104. 430.
8 Cassius Dio, xliii. 43.
4 Divus lulius 39.
12 115
more than eighteen months, and the Caesarian types
would have lost much of their point. We may there-
fore accept De Salis’s attribution of these coins to the
year of Caesar’s death. The first was probably struck
before the fatal event. Caesar is represented with
veiled head as pontifex maximus. The portrait, though
not nearly so well executed as the head on the coins
of L. Aemilius Buca, another moneyer of the same
year, is more like the traditional Caesar. He wears
the laurel-wreath, the perpetual use of which was
granted to him by the State, much, says Suetonius,1
to his satisfaction, because his baldness exposed him
to the derision of his enemies. Venus is represented
on the coin as the ancestress of the Julian house ;
she is here the Venus Victrix whose name was Caesar’s
watchword at Pharsalus and Munda,2 and whom he
had represented on his signet-ring.3 On the second
coin the palm-branch and wreath show that the
type is agonistic ; the rider is a desuitor, and the con-
test that in which a horseman leaps from one horse to
another in full gallop. Suetonius records4 that nobilis-
simi iuvenes rode in such races at the Circensian games
celebrated by Caesar. As this performance by young
men of good position was something out of the common,
Macer may have thought it a suitable type for coins
1 Divus lulius, 45.
2 Appian b.c. ii. 68. 281 ; 104. 430.
8 Cassius Dio, xliii. 43.
4 Divus lulius 39.
12 115