The Use and Reuse of Julius Caesar’s Religious Résumé on Imperatorial Coinage

Abstract

Soon after Roman mint masters began issuing the silver denarius (traditional date 187 B.C.), they discovered that they could employ coinage as newspapers and PR by individualizing the imagery on each side of the coin with references to their ancestry, current events, and/or their religious offices to increase their name recognition in order to win votes. It should come as no surprise that the Divine Julius ordered his mint masters to issue coinage that advertised all of the above features to circulate his good reputation in what our modern political scientists would call propaganda. After Julius’ enemies began to attack his reputation, some of his partisans boasted of their closeness to him on coinage by recycling specific coin images. What is surprising is how these partisans adopted the exact imagery Julius had used to advertise his own religious resume on their coinage, even though these religious images could not and did not apply to them specifically. Apparently, Julius’ religious resume no longer demonstrated a religious portfolio, but had transformed into a badge of partisanship, however thinly it applied, so that the religious symbols themselves retained only the function of an association with Julius without their original and intrinsic meaning.