Coins of the best-known Roman revolutionary era allow rival pretenders
to speak to us directly. After the deaths of Caesar and Cicero (in 44
and 43 BC) hardly one word has been reliably transmitted to us from even
the two most powerful opponents of Octavian: Mark Antony and Sextus
Pompeius - except through coinage and the occasional inscription. The
coins are an antidote to a widespread fault in modern approaches: the
idea, from hindsight, that the Roman Republic was doomed, that the rise
of Octavian-Augustus to monarchy was inevitable, and that contemporaries
might have sensed as much. Ancient works in other genres skilfully
encouraged such hindsight. Augustus in the Res Gestae, and Virgil in
Georgics and Aeneid, sought to flatten the history of the period, and
largely to efface Octavian's defeated rivals. But the latter's coins in
precious metal were not easily recovered and suppressed by Authority.
They remain for scholars to revalue. In our own age, when public
untruthfulness about history is increasingly accepted - or challenged,
we may value anew the discipline of searching for other, ancient, voices
which ruling discourse has not quite managed to silence. In this book
eleven new essays explore the coinage of Rome's competing dynasts.
Julius Caesar's coins, and those of his `son' Octavian-Augustus, are
studied. But similar and respectful attention is given to the issues of
their opponents: Cato the Younger and Q. Metellus Scipio, Mark Antony
and Sextus Pompeius, Q. Cornificius and others. A shared aim is to
understand mentalities, the forecasts current, in an age of rare
insecurity as the superpower of the Mediterranean faced, and slowly
recovered from, division and ruin.
