I am Finally Taking the Plunge!

I just ran across this article about this coin/series. You and other interested parties (e.g., @David Atherton ) can PM me an email address if you want the entire essay. Here's the abstract:


Visualizing Ceremony: The Design and Audience of the Ludi Saeculares Coinage of Domitian
Author(s): Melanie Grunow Sobocinski
Source:
American Journal of Archaeology,
Vol. 110, No. 4 (Oct., 2006)

Domitian's Ludi Saeculares coinage (88 C.E.) violates
the usual patterns of Roman mint production: one festi-
val dominates all six denominations of gold, silver, and
bronze. Consistency in legends and in reverse types across
the issue suggests that unusual care was taken in designing
these coins. One composition is even repeated in both
silver and bronze. Ten events during the Ludi Saeculares,
nine of them religious rituals prescribed by the Sibylline
oracle, are depicted on the bronze coinage. Variations
among specimens within each type, however, indicate
that some details, such as the pedimental iconography of
temples, were created by individual die carvers and must
not have been specified in the original design. Using the
textual evidence for other imperial celebrations of the Ludi
Saeculares, previous scholars have focused on matching
each coin type with a known event and each architectural
background with a specific location in Rome. This article
reveals the problems with such an approach and uses in-
stead a variety of historical, iconographic, and numismatic
methodologies to explore questions of design, audience,
context, and interpretation. I conclude that, for a limited
audience, these coins attempted to send a coherent mes-
sage emphasizing the solemnity and ritual completeness
of Domitian's Ludi Saeculares and linking his celebration
to Augustus' Ludi Saeculares of 17 B.C.E. But, because
Domitian's experiment in using the coinage for detailed
communication was not subsequently imitated, this set
of coins is unique.

 

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