Sulla’s dream – a denarius of the Roman republic

The year 44 B.C. and the denarius of L. Aemilius Buca

44 BC was no ordinary year in the history of the Roman republic. Since his triumph in the civil war against Pompey, Julius Caesar exercised undisputed control over the Roman republic. In 46 BC, he had been appointed dictator, but at the beginning of 44 BC he received the even more elevated title of “dictator for life” (dictator perpetuo rei publicae constituendae). Shortly thereafter, on the Ides of March, he was murdered by a conspiracy of young aristocrats who saw him as a tyrant intent on destroying the freedom of the Roman people.

44 BC was also a decisive year in the history of Roman coinage. One of the officials in charge of the mint of Rome, Lucius Aemilius Buca, had an extensive series of denarii minted.The coins had varied motifs including obverses representing the bust of Caesar accompanied by a legend referring to his status as perpetual dictator.  It was the first time that a living citizen was portrayed on a Roman coin, an exceptional honour whose only precedent was that of the Hellenistic kings, Alexander the Great and his successors. Undoubtedly, Ceasar was depicted in a kingly manner that conflicted with the Roman republican tradition.

Reverse with the scene traditionally interpreted as " Sulla' s dream "

In addition to the denarius depicting Caesar’s head, Buca had another coin minted that has attracted the attention of numismatic scholars since the Renaissance.

The obverse shows Venus' head, while the reverse depicts a man lying down, his head leaning back. The trunk of his body is naked, while a mantle is wrapped around his legs. From the right, Selene, identified by a crescent on her head, descends towards him. In her right hand she holds a torch, while her left hand and right foot rest on a rock. Between the man and the goddess, at the back of the scene, is a winged female figure, carrying an object that looks like a palm branch or a stick.

The traditional interpretation

The French numismatist Andreas Morell (1646-1703) was the first to propose an interpretation of this reverse scene that would make the coin famous. It was based on a passage from the life of Lucius Cornelius Sulla written by Plutarch. According to the latter, 

"It is said, also, that to Sulla himself there appeared in his dreams a goddess whom the Romans learned to worship from the Cappadocians, whether she is Luna, or Minerva, or Bellona. This goddess, as Sulla fancied, stood by his side and put into his hand a thunder-bolt, and naming his enemies one by one, bade him smite them with it; and they were all smitten, and fell, and vanished away. Encouraged by the vision, he told it to his colleague, and at break of day led on towards Rome.

Morell identified the reverse of Buca’s denarius as a representation of Sulla's dream, who would be the reclining human figure visited by the goddess. His interpretation would be adopted by the great Austrian numismatist Joseph Eckhel and the latter’s authority would grant it the general acceptance that this interpretations enjoys to this day.

An Alternative Interpretation - The Myth of Endymion

The great French numismatist Ernest Babelon rejected Morell's interpretation, seeing in the scene a representation of the Greek myth of the shepherd Endymion. According to legend, the goddess Selene fell in love with this beautiful young shepherd and obtained from Zeus the concession that he would always stay young sleeping so as to be able to visit him every night.

The Myth of Endymion

I find this interpretation more convincing than the traditional one, since it seems difficult to believe that one of the mint officials appointed by Caesar would have coined a type paying homage to Sulla, who adhered to a diametrically opposed political position.

Moreover, it seems difficult to think that contemporaries would have been so familiar with a personal anecdote of Sulla's life that we know only from scarce and later sources. On the contrary, the myth of Endymion, like most Greek legends, was well known to the Romans, who saw it frequently represented in theatre and art. 

Endymion is often represented in funerary contexts as an allusion to the eternal life granted by the gods. So I think it is most likely that the reverse type was chosen by Aemilius Buca as a tribute to the assassinated Caesar.

The Brescello Hoard – the largest and most valuable hoard of Roman coins ever found

Brescello, the ancient municipium of Brixellum, is a small town in northern Italy near Modena. Originally, it was a Gallic settlement on banks of the Po River that was romanized after the area was annexed by the Roman republic. The city was transformed into a Roman colony in the period following the assassination of César and it quickly became an important transport and communication hub.

It was in this city that in the year 1714 one of the most remarkable numismatic discoveries ever recorded took place. A peasant, while ploughing a field, accidentally found a vessel containing about 80,000 republican aurei, that is, approximately 650kg of pure gold!

The treasure was composed entirely of only 32 varieties of types coined between the years 46 and 38 BC, so it is quite safe to assume that it was buried in 38 or 37 BC. The latest coin identified was an aureus minted by Octavian that mentions Agrippa as consul designate for the year 37 (Crawford 534/1).

The hoard was most likely the treasure chest of a warlord of the period of civil wars. Its nominal value was 2,000,000 denarii. To put that figure on an understandable scale, it must be considered that the annual pay of a legionary in that period amounted to 250 denarii. Of course, the current value of the treasure would be much higher. A fairly conservative estimate of about $ 1000 on average for each coin gives a total value of $ 80,000,000. Undoubtedly, it is the most valuable hoard of Roman coins ever recorded, and by a wide margin.

The sheer size of the hoard is a good indicator of the enormous quantities of gold that were coined after Caesar’s victory in the civil war against Pompey. The new Caesarian aurei were minted by the millions and an important portion of this output was accumulated by a small elite, mainly in the entourage of the great political leaders of the period.

Unfortunately, very few of the coins discovered at Brescello survived. At the beginning of the 18th century there was not a sufficiently developed numismatic market as to absorb such a number of ancient coins. Therefore, after dispersing a relatively small part, the rest was melted to mint ducats!

The First Roman Coin

Its military expansion during the fourth century BC transformed the Roman Republic into the greatest power on the Italian peninsula. The political, economic, and cultural contacts with the Greek cities of Campania and southern Italy became much more intense. Compared to these Greek cities, Rome was, despite its power, a backward and predominantly rural society, in which trade played a comparatively minor role. The production of coinage was much more advanced in the cities of Magna Graecia than in Rome, where rustic bronze bars were used instead of coins. 

The need to interact with these cities led Rome to instruct its allies to produce a series of coins with Greek characteristics for its own use. That is the usual interpretation offered by experts for a range of early Roman coins which represent a clear break with the roman tradition of cast ingots. On the chronology of these coins there are, however, very different views. The information available is insufficient to settle the issue definitively. Here I follow the conclusions of Michael Crawford (see Roman Republican Coinage).

The first of these coins (Crawford 1/1) -illustrated above- has fascinated scholars since the origins of numismatic studies. It is made of bronze. On the obverse we can see Apollo crowned with laurels and on the reverse the front of a bull with a human head accompanied by the Greek legend RWMAIWN (of the Romans). Due to its characteristics and style, this coin is usually associated with the coinage of Naples, and is believed to have been produced in the mint of that city at the request of Rome. It was probably coined shortly after the treaty (foedus aequum) that united Naples and Rome as allies at the beginning of the second Samnite war in 326 BC. A second piece of bronze with similar characteristics was coined in Rome around 300 BC. 

This coin is particularly interesting because it is a “fiat currency”. This means that, unlike what happened with the ingots commonly used in this period as currency in Rome, this coin had almost no real value, it weighed only four and a half grams. Its value came from the fact that the Roman state and its allies accepted it as a means of payment. 

In the third century BC Rome entrusted its allies in southern Italy with the minting of a series of coins with a distinctly Greek outlook: the Roman silver didrachms. I will discuss them in a following post.