Recently I have been contacted privately by several forum members who wished to express their concern that I was buying all of the nicest coins, and there would be none left for others. The concern was raised after the release of my Tesserae Nummorum game that features coins from my collection. I have heard you. As a gesture of goodwill I have bought a coin that none of you wanted. The portrait on my latest coin is Vespasian. He is doing what he does on every coin: enduring something. Suetonius, who had access to people who had seen the man, describes him this way: "He was well built, with strong, sturdy limbs, and the expression of one who was straining. Apropos of which a witty fellow, when Vespasian asked him to make a joke on him also, replied rather cleverly: 'I will, when you have finished relieving yourself.'" -Suetonius, Vespasian 20 Vespasian's career was not always glamorous: Under Caligula: "when Vespasian was aedile, Gaius Caesar [Caligula], incensed at his neglect of his duty of cleaning the streets, ordered that he be covered with mud, which the soldiers accordingly heaped into the bosom of his purple-bordered toga (Suetonius, Vespasian 5). "On the tour through Greece, among the companions of Nero, he bitterly offended the emperor by either going out often while Nero was singing, or falling asleep, if he remained. Being in consequence banished, not only from intimacy with the emperor but even from his public receptions, he withdrew to a little out-of-the-way town, until a province and an army were offered him while he was in hiding and in fear of his life." (Vespasian 4). On the obverse, the die engraver captured the essence of the man. The blunt portrait was a return to the lined style of republican portraiture which contrasted with the softer portraits of Nero. Ugliness was a virtue: a soldier is now emperor. The reverse is the work of a mint worker in a rush: four letters in a wreath. One suspects he had a lunch appointment. I paid for it without guilt. Suetonius says of Vespasian that "the only thing for which he can fairly be censured was his love of money" (Vespasian 16, trans. Rolfe). When his son, Titus, objected to a tax on public urinals, the emperor held a coin from the first payment under his nose and asked whether it smelled. "When Titus said 'No', he replied, 'Yet it comes from urine'" (Vespasian 23). The city of Paris later honored the episode by calling its street urinals vespasiennes. There were 1,230 of them in the 1930s, and one survives, on the Boulevard Arago. Few emperors have a monument that useful. The coin Roman Empire, Rome. Vespasian (Augustus, AD 69 to 79). AR denarius (2.84g, 18.5mm). Dated AD 73. Obv: IMP CAES VESP AVG CEN, laureate head right. Rev: S P Q R within oak wreath. Ref: RIC II.1 (second edition) 547. The last three letters of the obverse, CEN, stands for censor. In AD 73 Vespasian and Titus took up the censorship, the old republican office that counted the citizens and revised the rolls of the Senate and the equestrian order. The office presented Vespasian as the restorer of order in Rome. The purges under Nero and the civil wars of AD 68 to 69 had thinned both orders. Suetonius says Vespasian "reformed the two great orders, reduced by a series of murders and sullied by long standing neglect, and added to their numbers" (Vespasian 9). Many of the new senators came from the Italian towns and the provinces, and historians generally see in this the start of a broader governing class. The censors also measured the city. Pliny the Elder records that in the year 826 of Rome, which is AD 73, with the Vespasians as emperors and censors, the circuit of the walls came to thirteen miles and two hundred paces (Natural History 3.66). The reverse deserves a second look. The oak wreath is the civic crown, the award for saving the lives of citizens, and the four letters name the donors: the Senate and People of Rome. Augustus had used the same imagery a century earlier. Vespasian was the son of a tax collector from the Sabine hills with no Julio-Claudian blood, so he needed legitimacy, and he borrowed it openly. Lex Vespasiani Lex de imperio Vespasiani in the Capitoline Museums, Rome Photo by José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro / CC BY-SA 4.0 The Lex de imperio Vespasiani, now in the Capitoline Museums, lists the powers conferred on Vespasian in AD 69 to 70. In May 1347 the notary Cola di Rienzo seized power in Rome from the baronial families and ruled for about seven months with the title of tribune. He displayed the tablet to argue that emperors received their authority from the people. Rome today still stamps SPQR on its manhole covers. Manhole cover, Rome, Photo by ProtoplasmaKid, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons A note on the silver of this coin: Although writers had assumed that Vespasian debased the denarius to pay for the civil war, Butcher and Ponting analyzed the denarii of Vespasian and found that the Rome mint held Nero's standard of about 80 percent silver through the whole reign. I leave you with this commitment: the nicest coins remain available to all. I make no promises about the ugly ones. Share your ugly coins of Vespasian (beautiful ones too). References Butcher, Kevin, and Matthew Ponting. "The Denarius in the First Century." Rivista Italiana di Numismatica 110 (2009): 558-568. Suetonius. Life of Vespasian. Translated by J. C. Rolfe. Loeb Classical Library, 1914. Watson, Alan. "Vespasian: Adsertor Libertatis Publicae." Classical Review 23, no. 2 (1973).
