Two Aes of Ancient Spain: Castulo, Colonia Celsa

Certain catalogers, like Burgos, describe heads like that of your second coin as "resembling Augustus." Yours is in fact a very good resemblance, one of the best I've seen, making it quite special in my opinion. Does the morphology suggest a chronology, ie., that the heads that don't resemble Augustus come before his time? The problem is the coins aren't dated. Can we roughly date the coins by style, or were the mints depicting different people at the same time, or was there simply an accepted wide variance in engraving styles?

 

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While I see some resemblance to Augustus, I have never been convinced that the face here was a portrait or even done in his time. We really do not have a good grasp on when these issues started and stopped. The 'not Augustus' styles are hardly even human enough to say they were a portrait but were more a stylized head so how are we to know what they were trying to achieve?

 

They seem very much like caricatures, and the coins in this thread don't even represent the most stylized of the busts. There are many with much longer noses and elongated heads.

 

How is your Spanish? found another Cal lahorras Aug.

 

IBERIAN
AE Semis
OBVERSE: Young male head right, Phoenician letter before
REVERSE: Bull right, crescent above, two Phoenicial letters below
Struck at Castulo Late 1st century BC
15.6mm, 1.8g
Burgos 897

 

cyrrhus => cool coins

Hey dawg, if we're trying to speak Spanish, then I wanna try and say

"I want a beer and a sweet bull coin!!"

=> "Quiero una cerveza y una moneda toro dulce" ... (close enough?)



Oh, and that's an extremely sweet little idol head (very cool ... man, I love it!!)



Oh, and Doug => gawd, that red baby is awesome (eye appeal galore, my friend)



yah, I am totally jealous of that sweet example (full points for obverse portrait and for super sweet bull reverse) ... total winner!!

man, you guys are showing some very cool stuff on this thread => great thread!!

 

Curious? ... Bing, do you happen to remember this classic/imfamous ol' avatar? (sorry, I'm just being a bit coin-retro)



yah, my "antique" (1950's) beer tray used to be my avatar at my last coin-stint ...

uh-oh ... I'm hammered (NFL weekend, coins, booze ... la-la-la-la-la)

 

http://www.nytimes.com/1984/01/10/s...s-learn-how-augustus-idealized-his-image.html

Over the years I have been led to believe that Augustus played with his public image more than most emperors bringing a degree of idealization to the portraits on coins and statues. That leads us to the possibility tht my coin does not look like Augustus but that Augustus was trying to look like my coin or, rather, the 1st century ideal of what an emperor should look like. Today we have plastic surgeons who would make Augustus look like his coins but he might have settled by having his coins made to look just a bit more perfect. The Archaic Greeks made statues of male and female ideals to demonstrate their concept of beauty. It is hardly a stretch to think that the die cutters of Spain might have been cutting attractive male ideals for their coins even before the ruler of the Roman world decided to use similar facial structures and call them his own. I am completely at a loss how we are to prove this sort of thing. There is considerable variation in the appearance of emperor portraits whether coin of lifesize. Ho do we know which looks like him an which looks like the 'him he wished to be'?

Museums all have portrait busts claiming to be one emperor or another but many are not labelled. How do we know that a certain portrait is actually Septimius Severus and not a rich merchant who adopted the hair and beard of the then current emperor like we now have people going to their beautician and saying make me look like (insert name of your favorite Hollywood idol)?

 

Interesting article. I can definitely believe that the Prima Porta statue is an idealization. The Imperatorial coinage of him as Octavian predates the Prima Porta statue, and it generally shows him with a small head, delicate facial features, and a weak chin, although his nose is quite pointed and strong. Many of the busts are not those of an attractive man. I can certainly see him telling the Prima Porta sculptor to make everything stronger.

Perhaps the Spanish minters were also told to copy some idealized version, or told to make the emperor look handsome, and what we're seeing is their idea of handsome (if they're depicting him at all).

Then there are all the busts which are so stylized that they can't possibly refer to a real person, at least in my opinion. Some local deity? I went down in flames bidding on this coin tonight - the demand for the really distinctive caricature busts in good grades is quite high...

 

Yep, remember it well lil bro.