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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;DonnaML, post: 7572686, member: 110350&quot;]Thanks for all the kind words, and all those beautiful examples of relevant coins. Right now the voting is a landslide, 14 to 1 in favor of the Aeneas interpretation. I did try to present both sides of the argument as fully as possible, but I admit that I made no attempt to hide my own preference for the Aeneas interpretation. I do wonder, though, if there&#039;s something obvious there that none of us is seeing, that has caused the overwhelming majority of scholars for more than three centuries to identify the carrying figure unequivocally as a Catanaean brother, even after it became clear that the supposed Sicilian connection is non-existent, and that the moneyer&#039;s family was Etruscan. What are we missing?</p><p><br /></p><p>It seems to me that the strongest argument for rejecting the Aeneas interpretation is that the figure is naked (rather than armor-clad) and doesn&#039;t carry any symbolic object like the Palladium on the Julius Caesar coin. But the same is true of the Octavian aureus, which almost everyone accepts portrays Aeneas. And it also seems to me that the strongest argument for rejecting the Catanaean brothers interpretation is far stronger: simply put, that there were <u>two</u> Catanaean brothers -- with <u>both</u> of them portrayed on every other coin or work of art depicting the story -- but only <u>one</u> figure on the Herennius coin. I don&#039;t think Berdowski really deals adequately with that fact. After all, in his review of the Evans book, William E. Metcalf -- a pretty big deal himself as a numismatic scholar -- focused on that fact as the most important reason for his agreement with Evans that the figure is indeed Aeneas:&nbsp; &quot;Both stories are exempla of Pietas, the deity depicted on the coin’s obverse, but showing only one man carrying a parent is more likely to bring to mind the story of Aeneas than that of the Sicilian brothers.&quot;</p><p><br /></p><p>Is there anyone who reads Italian who would be willing to take a look at the Claudia Perassi article upon which Berdowski relies, to see if there&#039;s anything more persuasive in it? The jstor link is <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/20860357?read-now=1&amp;seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/20860357?read-now=1&amp;seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents" rel="nofollow">https://www.jstor.org/stable/20860357?read-now=1&amp;seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents</a>. I scrolled through it just to look at the illustrations, none of which is different in kind from what I&#039;ve seen before.</p><p><br /></p><p>Finally, a couple of photos of a type of object I didn&#039;t show before, namely the Etruscan clay figurines from Veii -- the richest city in the Etruscan League, located on the Tiber only 12 miles north of Rome -- showing Aeneas carrying Anchises.&nbsp; Further evidence of the early popularity of the story in Italy, contrary to the suggestion by some authorities that prior to Virgil, the Catanaean brothers story was far more popular than that of Aeneas and Anchises.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><img src="https://i.pinimg.com/564x/7a/19/e3/7a19e374051dd32b31f1a4dfa9f9f678.jpg" class="bbCodeImage wysiwygImage" alt="" unselectable="on" /></p><p><br /></p><p><img src="https://klio.uoregon.edu/im/rr/early%20republic/aen&amp;anch.gif" class="bbCodeImage wysiwygImage" alt="" unselectable="on" />[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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