Mysteries of the M. Junius Silanus denarius (145 BCE) revealed!

[Edit - There is an update, please follow the link in post #10. Thank you, Sallent!]

As you all know, I purchased an M Junius Silanus denarius the other day. Unfortunately, despite this being a very beautiful example of a Roman Republic denarius, there a huge dearth of information available on this coin online. One of the most compelling features of the coin, an ass' head behind Roma, remains a mystery. No website online provides the meaning of this ancient pun. Furthermore, there is no information on who M. Junius even was. A Wikipedia search yields others by that name who came a generation or two later, but the man behind this denarius cannot be found anywhere.

I knew I needed to do this coin justice. It is not right that these two key bits of information should remain hidden from us. This coin is just too compelling to just be content with the lack of information about it. So determined to honor the man who gave us an ass' head behind Roma, and recover the original meaning behind this comical symbol, I've spent several hours trying to uncover the mystery, and I'm proud to report that this ancient coin can now speak to us for the first time in a long time.

MYSTERY OF THE ASS' HEAD PUN REVEALED

I had to dig deep, but the answer to this mystery is contained in the "Descriptive Catalogue of a Cabinet of Roman Family Coins Belonging to His Grace The Duke of Northumberland, LG, by Rear-Admiral Henry Smyth," published in 1856.

According to this mid-19th century book, page 113, the ass' head is believed to refer to the name Brutus (stupid), and is an allusion to the assumed fatuity of the elder liberator (whom as you all know was the man responsible for driving the last king out of Rome, and the founder of the Brutus family). One of his descendants would go down in history as the man who killed Julius Caesar, and ended the Republic.

MYSTERY OF THE MAN BEHIND THE COIN

According to the same source, the person responsible for this coin is believed to be Marcus Junius Brutus Silanus, a provincial quaestor in 159 BCE, and who held the position of monetary quaestor before that. So if you have a Roman coin from 160 BCE, chances are he supervised it's production. The man behind the ass' head ran the mint for the Roman Republic No wonder he had such a good sense of humor when it came to choosing what to depict on his coin.

And there you have it. It took a little digging, but this coin finally has a chance to speak again, and maybe by placing this information in an accessible and very public place, the next person who buys one of these coins will know the history and meaning behind it, instead of having to guess, and regret the lack of information on it.

Thank you M. Junius Brutus Silanus for leaving us this legacy, and thank you for running the Roman mint and overseeing the creation of so many other wonderful coins during your time as the head of the mint. Some of those coins you helped oversee are probably now resting in the collections of others here.

 

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Part of the fun collecting these 2000 + year old objects is doing the research and solving mysteries. Well done Sallent!

 

Good information and sleuthing.

 

Nice truth hunt and nice coin.

 

Google has scanned this book, and it's available for free. It is a very extensive catalog of Roman Republic coins belonging to each noble family. It has no images, but you can search under the family name for you coin, then go down the descriptions until you find yours. Chances are there will be information for your coin such as the background of the Roman noble who commissioned it, some information on some of the symbols for your coin, and some other known history on it. You never know what you may find if you take the time and have the patience to look.

Unfortunately the Duke didn't have every coin ever produced, but he sure had a lot of coins, so chances are good some of yours could be there.

https://books.google.com/books?id=00tQAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA306&lpg=PA306&dq=A catalogue of family of roman coins&source=bl&ots=kXqOfRkyf_&sig=AaM9Ynr0i8-iNKTfft-jPjR7znQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjr9tmJyarJAhXLmx4KHZy7BncQ6AEIHTAA#v=onepage&q=A catalogue of family of roman coins&f=false

You can also buy the book on Amazon. It is not that expensive:

http://www.amazon.com/Descriptive-C...coins+belonging+His+Grace+Duke+Northumberland

 

Now {putting on my historian's cap}, where did Henry Smyth get his information? Under what basis is it 'believed' to relate to the Brutus family? You've done a remarkable job finding this lead, but the information is presented with some uncertainty... Could we find another source and be certain? I know we can never be too certain with some of our ancient coins, but I don't think it's wise to readily accept information which sounds a little like an educated guess.

 

The Brutus belonged to the Junia clan. That is verifiable by ancient roman sources. The author freely admits that the interpretation of the ass' head standing for Brutus is only the best known information he's found at the time he was writing the catalog, though it sounds legit as Brutus can mean stupid in Latin in the right context, and the Brutus were part of the Junia clan, which the coiner was a member of. So it does seem like a fun way by the coiner to poke fun at his family legacy.

At the end of the day, it is the best we have to go on. Previous sources for this information are probably lost to history. Unless I find an older or second source that says different, this is the best we have.

If I find anything contradictory in the future, I will bring it to this forum's attention. But for now I'm confident on this, and it is a more logical explanation for the ass' head than my previous hypothesis (based on my own educated guess) on what it might represent.

 

I will freely admit my ignorance of Roman genealogies, and if the author admits the pun of the ass's head is a guess, then that's acceptable. I just get worried about 19th century books, if their information can't be found in more recent works! It usually means they've been disregarded (and often for a reason...)

 

In all fairness, how many catalogs on Roman coins have been published? The list is not extensive. This is simply one man's labor of love, and the research he conducted in the 1850's (based on the information he had available to him) on a ton of Roman coins that were made available to him for study. Much of the sources he relied on probably don't even exist anymore. That his book still exists, and is still available in printed format (you can order a new copy of the book if you want from Amazon) says a lot about the quality of his work. If it was garbage I doubt there would still be a market for this book more than 150 years later.

Was the author perfect? Of course not, but he seems to have done a good job putting it all together, and enough people found value in his work that it still survives and is in print.

 

See this new thread which corrects some mistakes I made about the minter of the OP coin.

The information contained in the OP post is factually incorrect.

https://www.cointalk.com/threads/co...-junius-silanus-denarius.295172/#post-2719655