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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Severus Alexander, post: 3167792, member: 84744&quot;]Some of the strikes against other theories of the elephant/snake symbolism:</p><p><br /></p><p><b>Conquest of Gaul, with the snake being a carnyx</b> (the theory TIF mentioned): The biggest problem I see with this is that the snake simply doesn&#039;t look like a carnyx!&nbsp; There are several other examples of Gaulish war trumpets on RR coins and none of them look much like this.&nbsp; (Whereas the household genius representation is exactly right.)</p><p><br /></p><p><b>Triumph over evil </b>(Crawford): This is simply anachronistic.&nbsp; There&#039;s no evidence the snake represented evil to the ordinary person at this time.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>Elephant vs. snake = the civil war tussle</b>: There&#039;s an element of this in my favoured hypothesis (the familial conflict), but there&#039;s a specific snake-elephant trope that some have proposed as a basis for contemporary understanding of the image.&nbsp; From Pliny and one or two others comes the idea that the snake and the elephant are iconic enemies in constant conflict.&nbsp; One problem is that this belief does not seem to have been widespread.&nbsp; Another is that it doesn&#039;t actually tell us who or what families the snake and elephant actually represent. Third, Pliny says the two end up killing each other, so there is no victor.&nbsp; (Fair enough, war has no winners... but perhaps not great propaganda, at least not without an element of my favoured Harlan-type hypothesis as well.)</p><p><br /></p><p><b>Any theory proposing the elephant = Caesar or (better) Caesar&#039;s family</b>: There&#039;s very little to associate Caesar&#039;s family with elephants.&nbsp; A few much later authors, in trying to explain the issue, state that one of Caesar&#039;s ancestors killed an elephant, or that the name &quot;Caesar&quot; resembles the Punic word for elephant.&nbsp; These writings have an air of desperately trying to make sense of something that makes no sense to the author.&nbsp; I actually think this desperation supports Harlan&#039;s idea.&nbsp; The family of the Caecilii Metelli were reduced to nonentities soon after Caesar&#039;s victory, and disappeared from history in the first century CE.&nbsp; As a result, the association that was obvious in Caesar&#039;s time was utterly gone a couple centuries later, causing puzzlement to numismatists ever since.</p><p><br /></p><p>There is one theory that dovetails with Harlan&#039;s: <b>that Caesar was referring to and mocking Pompey by means of the elephant</b>.&nbsp; Pompey had a couple of rather embarrassing and very public experiences with elephants, one where he tried to enter Rome in his triumph pulled by elephants (they got stuck!), and another where the games he sponsored involved the slaughter of elephants, much to the chagrin of the viewing public.&nbsp; Unfortunately for him, poor Pompey was sardonically associated with elephants in the public&#039;s mind, so the coin could imply criticism not only of the Caecilii Metelli but also of Pompey, who was equally trampling on the health of the Republic, the People, and Caesar&#039;s genius.&nbsp; That would leave only one of Caesar&#039;s principal enemies unalluded to on the coin, namely Cato.&nbsp; (He was perhaps impossible to attack due to his reputation for uprightness.&nbsp; Plus his power was rather limited as he didn&#039;t have much money... in a way, he just didn&#039;t matter much at this point.)</p><p><br /></p><p>I should note that these issues and others are nicely discussed by Debra Nousek in her paper “Turning Points in Roman History: The Case of Caesar’s Elephant Denarius,” <i>Phoenix</i>, 2008, 62:290-307.&nbsp; She highlights Pompey&#039;s embarrassing elephants in particular, and also suggests that Caesar was <i>appropriating</i> the imagery of the Caecilii Metelli.&nbsp; I doubt this since it seems a stretch to suppose the general public would appreciate such a subtle move; but it was Nousek&#039;s paper that gave Harlan his original idea.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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