Coins of the Roman usurpers
By Jonathan Williams | Tuesday, 4 July 2000
What makes a king a king, or a president a president? How do they get there, how do we come to believe in them? These are questions that he and a colleague from the Museum, Clive Cheesman, had tried to tackle in an exhibition at the British Museum in 1999 that was entitled Rebels, Pretenders, Impostors.
The answers to the questions just posed might seem rather obvious: in the good old days of emperors and monarchies, people came to the throne by inheritance, mostly from father to son, power passing within a ruling house or dynasty. In the modem world of elective republics, heads of state mostly come to power by popular mandate or, in less liberal states, by internal party choice. Things are not, however, always as simple as that — neither were they in the monarchical past either. Even in the most dynastic of monarchies those where great stress was placed on the succession of the eldest son as the only acceptable means of transferring legitimate sovereignty from one generation to another, there were constant ruptures in the skein of supposed continuity.
Take, for instance, Henry VII of England who, in 1485, overthrew and killed Richard III, the legal and crowned king, at the battle of Bosworth Field. Henry was sprung from a bastard line of the House of Lancaster only distantly connected with the royal family, the house of York and, moreover, one that had been expressly barred from succession to the throne. But, upon the death of Richard, there were no doubts about who was king — law and custom had to give way before the realities of power.
The question we were interested in, both in the exhibition and the accompanying book, was just how did he, and others like him, get away with it? How indeed does any usurper whose attempt at, or accession to power is unorthodox manage to persuade people to regard him, and it usually is a him, as the genuine article, the real king and not just a pretender? One of the ways that henry VII achieved this was to marry the daughter of Edward IV, a previous king from the House of York, which allowed him to claim to have united the two feuding dynasties. This was a point underlined in his rather splendid gold coins when he introduced the gold sovereign with its conjoined roses reverse, producing the Tudor rose.
Henry was also helped by the fact that Richard III had himself been a usurper, having come to power in a palace coup. Richard had had his nephew, King Edward V, declared to be illegitimate and then (probably) murdered, whilst contemporary and later chronicles blacked his character to show that he was not universally popular. Despite this, Henry was troubled by would-be pretenders – Lambert Simnel, and the more serious Perkin Warbeck, who pretended to be Prince Richard, the son of Edward IV.
However, the reputation for military success, some smoothing over of the dynastic cracks, did the trick. Henry was able to establish the Tudors as one of the most successful ruling families in English history.
What the usurper has to do to establish his claim is to make out that he is the natural choice of the gods and/or men, and that his predecessor was the wrong man for the job, whatever his qualifications by birth. Religion, politics and history are mobilised to persuade people who matter that this is the case, or at least to reconcile their consciences to the new man in power. Material culture is exploited to advertise the appearances, the claims and symbols of the new ruling house. In the medieval and modern periods we tend to known a lot about this kind of thing since much has survived the vicissitudes of time. For large sections of antiquity, including the Roman Empire, we are less well informed. Of the different kinds of decorative art and symbolism that were produced in the ancient world, one of the most abundantly extant is coinage and its attendant designs.
It forms for us the most plentiful and varied source for the imagery of the successive emperors who ruled the Roman world from the late first century BC onwards, and has a lot to tell us about the rebels, the pretenders and the impostors of Rome.
The Roman Empire is known as a model of efficient, if somewhat brutal, organisation and considerable human achievement. The Roman army successfully defended thousands of miles of frontier from north Britain to North Africa for several centuries; Roman architecture erected monuments that have survived the biting rain and the flight of time, as the Roman poet Horace put it. Roman literature created masterpieces of both poetry and prose that are still widely read to this day, if admittedly mostly in translation, while Roman law elaborated certain fundamental concepts of jurisprudence which have ever since underlain most western legal thinking.
Yet, the Roman emperors as a group are popularly known as a bunch of corrupt, conniving, immoral, incestuous, and treacherous scoundrels. How can this be? How can be reconcile these two rather opposite pictures? He answer is because there is substantial truth in both of them. The empire was a stable and enduring state that united the whole of the Mediterranean basin and much of continental Europe for almost 450 years. During this period is was regularly wracked with civil war, imperial family intrigues, armed rebellion and murderous usurpation.
What eventually brought the Roman Empire in the west to an end (the eastern part continued on as the so-called Byzantine Empire down until 1453) was arguably not internal weakness so much as external pressures from peoples and states beyond the frontiers. How did the Roman empire manage to survive its period self-immolation intact for so long more or less intact?
Continuing instability at the top of the empire meant that emperors did come and go with alarming frequency, particularly in the apparently chaotic third century AD. Despite all this, the empire remained and the city of Rome endured: ROMA AETERNA, as she increasingly came to be called, the eternal city that would never fall, whose continuity guaranteed the future of the empire. Rome's eventual capture by the Goths under Alaric in AD 410 sent shock waves throughout the empire. St Jerome, hearing about this inconceivable event in the Holy Land, where he lived, wrote: In one city the whole world perished — the fall of Rome meant the end of human history. For St Augustine of Hipppo in North Africa, it provided the incentive to write The City of God, about the eternal city that would never fall, to refute the insinuation that it was the abandonment of the old gods by the Christians that led to the apparent decline of Roman power.
The symbolic appeal of Rome had created an important mental glue which held the empire together in times of crisis. The inhabitants of the empire from Britain to Syria, from Germany to Egypt, knew very little of one another's lives. They had some, if an increasingly minimal, sense of themselves as a civic community, even, or rather especially, after all the free citizens of the empire were enfranchised in AD 212. But they did all have a sense that they belonged to a community called the Romans, people who stood in a special relationship to Rome. Rome had become more than a city, it was the heart and soul of the empire, and each emperor was its temporary incarnation. Though usurpers assaulted the city, and Roman legions fought one another in bloody battles, none of them turned against Rome as an idea. Secession on the part of one or more provinces with a view to creating a new state with a new name was never a feasible project. Areas of the empire did from time to time split off under their own emperors, but they always claimed to do so as Romans under the banner of Rome, not to separate themselves from her.
The talismanic name of Rome provided the symbolic bond that held the sprawling, multi-ethnic empire together through thick and thin, but there was a legal aspect to the unity of the empire as well – the Roman emperors existed within a constitution that long predated them. The city and the empire of Rome had been governed as an aristocratic republic for 480 years before Augustus took over and established himself as monarch in 27 BC. This inheritance was important to the Romans, and it remained important even under the emperors, or rather especially under the emperors.
Romans did not like to think that things had changed much. The old Republic had to be perpetuated in their imaginations precisely because the reality of power had changed so much - but that is a side issue. The main point is that Augustus and his successor emperors were a sort of secondary, bolt-on addition to the Roman constitution. They were not, in theory, essential to it and, because of the republican background to the rise of the monarchy in Rome, dynastic connections were not an essential qualification for imperial office. What made an emperor legally an emperor was a law of the people and a vote of the Senate. This might in most instances have been a formality but, like many formalities, it was important.
Augustus was, in many ways, the first imperial usurper. He had taken power through armed victory in civil war – much as Henry VII had but, unlike him, he changed the republican system he took charge of by establishing himself as monarch over it. However, he made sure that he appeared to do so in a republican manner. This was his particular challenge in usurping power, to achieve an extraordinary a ct of political sleight of hand and persuade the Romans that not only was he the right man to rule the Roman world, but that the 'ship of state' could only continue with him at the tiller. The crucial point at which he achieved this transformation was not in 31 BC when he defeated the ships of Marc Antony and Cleopatra at the battle of Actium in the Adriatic, but a few years later in 28 and 27 BC. Throughout this period he successfully transformed himself from a vi ctorious warlord with supreme but unconstitutional power over the state into the first citizen with constitutionally grounded supreme power over the state.
No piece of evidence sums this up better than two coins from these years. The first is a unique piece in the British Museum, struck in 28 BC, which, moreover, is the only extant piece of contemporary evidence attesting to one of the most important events in world history – the establishment of the Roman principate, or imperial regime. It shows Augustus on the obverse wreathed in triumphal laurel and again, on the reverse, but this time sitting on his magistrate's chair as consul holding out a document scroll. Around him are the expressive but deceptive words: he has restored the laws and rights of the Roman people. His whole plan hung on the credibility of this claim.
It was, of course, a massive piece of pretence. What he was really doing was arrogating power to himself, not giving it to the people. He was making himself king in all but name, usurping power, and using it to force everyone else to act in public as though he did not in fact possess it, while deferring to him in all important matters of state and acknowledging his unique political position. A former senior British civil servant once said that the secret of politics is to have your cake and eat it – not perhaps a well-kept secret on reflection. Anyway, if anyone did, it was Augustus.
The second of these important coins was struck by him in 27 BC. It shows a very different kind of image, much more allusive and less wordy: the eagle of Jupiter holding an oak wreath crown with two bay tree bushes of the god Apollo behind and, above, Augustus' new name spelt out – AVGVSTVS – granted to him by the Senate in January of that year. Without going into all the complex Roman symbolism of it all, it conveys the transcendent, near-divine nature of Augustus' power and his divinely-blessed victory. But, at the bottom are two crucial letters – S C – standing for Senatus Consulto – By Decree of the Senate. All this power and glory given legally and appropriately to Augustus by his fellow Romans in recognition of his having saved them from ruin and Cleopatra. The gods may well have supported Augustus' rise to power, and he may have won it through violence in battle, but it was the proper legal channels that gave him his right to exercise it.
All his successors would maintain this theoretical position on the nature of imperial power, which would have interesting effects on the nature of usurpation in the Roman system.
Though the realities of power meant that sons did tend to succeed fathers in Rome's post-republican monarchy, the necessity for all emperors, even those who inherited power, to lay claim to a senatorial mandate as the ostensible justification of their exalted position meant that the way was potentially open for usurpers and pretenders to dispute the succession and make good their own claim. If they succeeded, and this was usually though warfare, they too could become the legitimate emperor with the approval of the senate and people, no matter whose son they were.
Sometimes the Senate misinterpreted the actual nature of their role in negotiating the succession of emperors, as in AD 238 when, in opposition to the existing but unloved emperor Maximinus, they elected two of their senior members, Balbinus and Pupienus, to be co-emperors.
This pair, although possessing the formal qualification for legitimate power courtesy of the Senate, lacked any support among the imperial Praetorian Guard or the people and, though they saw off Maximinus (who was murdered by his troops), they lasted only three months before they themselves were murdered by the Praetorians. They were replaced by a 13-year old boy, Gordian III, raised to the purple, again by the Praetorians. The senators wisely refrained from withholding their approval of the Praetorian nominee. They had, perhaps, learnt their lesson, having once mistaken their power of formal validation for the power of real political initiative which, as a body, they had lost very early in the history of the empire.
Just how early this had happened was shown in the first real succession crisis which the Roman Empire faced in AD 41 after the murder of the mad, bad emperor Gaius, better known by his nickname of Caligula (Little Boot). Gaius died without a designated heir. There were no precedents for this event. Tiberius had succeeded Augustus in AD 14, and Gaius had succeeded Tiberius in 37, both by prearrangement. What should happen now? On the very day of Gaius' murder the Senate met and, as reported by the late first-century AD Jewish historian Josephus, the consuls declared their intention to assume executive power themselves and return Rome to republican forms of government after seventy years of monarchy (Jewish Antiquities 19, 1-4).
However, the words counted for little against the will of the real-power brokers of Imperial Rome. They were not the noble senators but the Praetorians stationed in their barracks in the city of Rome itself, 12,000 or so troops whose loyalties were not to the Senate or people but to the emp er or who paid their wages and guaranteed their not inconsiderable privileges. Gaius himself had increased their numbers. This significant force in Roman politics had no interest in returning to the aristocratic Republic, and every reason to look for a new emperor. They found one in the person of Claudius, Gaius' uncle and a grandson of Augustus' wife Livia on one side and Augustus' sister on the other.
Was Claudius then a usurper? He had come to power in something approaching a military coup following the assassination of the previous and lawful emperor, but his succession was legitimised by the Senate and ratified in due fashion. No matter that he was not the designated heir of Gains (Caligula), Rome's republican monarchy had ways of smoothing over abrupt dynastic transitions such as this which allowed the system to continue and did not require the total reorientation of the whole state.
Rebellion in the name of liberty had stirred the breasts of some of the more romantic senators, but meant little to the common soldiery whose allegiances to the emperors, as Claudius had wisely ensured, were focussed exclusively on themselves and their families. The coins the emperors struck were, of course, one of the ways in which this effect was achieved.
Bearing the emperor's name and head on one side, the coins, particularly the gold and silver ones, were struck with the army very much in mind as the primary, if not sole, consumers. It is no coincidence that the Roman silver coin, the denarius, tends nowadays to be found in provinces where there were large numbers of soldiers stationed, i.e. on the frontiers, rather than in the central Mediterranean provinces. Now this is not to say that the designs on these coins constituted a form of propaganda as we would understand it. This seems to be an unhelpful term with far too many anachronistic connotations of the totalitarian twentieth century which do not apply very well to antiquity. Propaganda requires an element of political ideology, an idea to be propagated.
There was no political ideology in the Roman Empire. Government in the Roman world was not about politics or policies, emperors had no manifestos or programmes. Ruling in Rome was not about producing new ideas so much as enacting a more authentic and effective realisation of the old ones. Emperors were not meant to be innovators but renovators. Novelty was understood only as revival, a New Age as the cyclical recommencement of the Golden Age, the saeculum aureum (see Andrew Burnett's talk, above). It is possible to argue that coins were propaganda in a sense that they served to propagate the face of the new emperor, to spread his personality cult, but would you call a modern monarch's head appearing on coins or banknotes propaganda?
Roman coin designs are better described as monuments rather than propaganda. They were intended to bring events, buildings, people and their qualities to mind, in Latin monere, not to persuade their audiences of a particular way of thinking, suadere in Latin. They remind us who the emperor is, representing his likeness to us, they record for us and for posterity the virtues and achievements of the great man and his family. In effect they are small-scale, widely circulating and mass-produced monuments to his glory and position offered by a grateful Senate and People to their excellent leader — not propaganda pumped out by a political office located somewhere on the Palatine Hill in Rome, for which there is no evidence. The argument there is that the concept of propaganda does not adequately account for whatever that might be.
What, then, about the coins of the Roman usurpers?
The concept of 'Change' is central to modern western ideologies, but this was not the case in the ancient world. Change towards an unfamiliar unknown was eschewed in favour of the restoration of the familiar, but lost, past. The usurper was figured not as the bringer of a new age but as the restorer of Rome, the one who would take Rome back to its very origins and revitalise the old commonwealth through new victories in the old style.
In AD 68 and 69 the Roman Empire underwent a further series of succession crises involving the rapid rise and fall of four emperors, all of whom where usurpers in the sense that they took power by violence and were not designated to succeed their predecessor. However, all of them were duly recognised retrospectively, upon their seizure of power, by the Senate and People as the lawful emperor. It all began with the first stirrings of rebellion against Nero in AD 68. He was extremely unpopular with the senatorial elite, having killed too many of them in dubious circumstances in his later years, though he was rather a favourite with the soldiers and the people of Rome as he was a bit of a character. Early in 68 one of the governors of Gaul, Julius Vindex, entered into open rebellion against Nero and called upon the governor of one of the Spanish provinces, Servius Sulpicius Galba, to proclaim himself emperor.
Vindex's revolt was put down but Galba was recognised as emperor upon Nero's suicide in early 68. Although Galba's reign was an inastute and inglorious one, and although later historians heaped criticism upon his memory, he was always acknowledged as a legitimate emperor. Though he had taken power by force, though he was unrelated to Nero, it was universally accepted that Galba had been an emperor, even if he should never have become such according to his merits. By general consent, wrote the historian Tacitus, a master of the ironical aside, he [Galba] would have made an excellent emperor had he never become one.
Galba quickly became unpopular and in January 69 two rebellions broke out against him simultaneously: one among the legions on the Rhine frontier, who had never liked him, led by their commander Vitellius, and one in Rome itself led by Otho, a former henchman of Nero who had transferred his allegiance to Galba at an opportune moment. The second of these, being closer to Galba succeeded at getting at him first: he was hacked to death in the Roman Forum. Otho was duly proclaimed emperor by the Senate, but the German legions would have none of this.
Instead of rebellion against Galba they now transferred their enmity to Otho, determined as they were to see their man, Vitellius, in power. Vitellius' army lumbered south and eventually met Otho's in northern Italy, and defeated it in April 69. Otho committed suicide and the Senate proclaimed Vitellius as emperor. He was no more successful than Galba or Otho in securing the loyalty of the empire. In July the armies of the east swore an oath to their commander, Vespasian, as though he were emperor, the armies of the Danube broke out into revolt against Vitellius and in support of Vespasian. By the end of the year Vitellius was dead and Vespasian acknowledged as emperor. He managed to stop the wheel of fortune turning, established himself as emperor, founding the Flavian dynasty, and was to be succeeded by his two sons, Titus and Domitian, the latter being assassinated in 96.
The historical lessons of these events are threefold. First, they demonstrated once again the importance of the army in making an emperor. Without that support no emperor could continue in post for long. Secondly, they revealed the essentially secondary role of the Senate in making emperors when the issue was in doubt. This august body of senior statesmen and nobles could really only rubber-stamp a fait accompli, they had no power of initiative because they commanded the loyalty of no troops whatsoever.
Thirdly, however, it also revealed the vital nature of this secondary role. For even though the Senate could not elect emperors against the wishes of the army or the people, its validation of decisions taken elsewhere, on the battlefield for instance, was still a sine qua non for aspiring emperors. Legitimacy was conferred on emperors by the Senate, it was not by heredity or by the gods. It was this, paradoxically, which both opened the way for usurpers to aspire to the purple, birth being no bar, and yet it also ensured the stability of the whole system, even during periods of intense civil strife, because it was not as if the whole framework of the state was in doubt, only the relatively superficial question of who would fulfil the role of emperor for the next few years (or less). No emperor, however rebellious his origins, ever proposed the abolition of the Senate and the establishment of an absolute monarchy. Even Constantine the Great, who was innovative enough to create a new city in Constantinople as a second capital, had to create a second Senate to sit there, so inviolable was the prestige of this apparently powerless, but crucial, body.
If we examine the coins of the three unsuccessful usurpers: Galba, Otho, and Vitellius, it is immediately apparent that they were all newcomers, and they all had to move quickly to convince the people that mattered, the senators, the army and the people of Rome, that they were worth supporting. The way in which intelligent Roman usurpers tended to do this was first to secure the formal approval of the Senate and people, and then pay large amounts of money to the Praetorians and the legions.
This, however, was only the start. Usurped power could always be legalised and fidelity bought, but to acquire an enduring hold on the Romans' imagination, the person of the emperor had to be able to represent something more than just his own personal interests. That something was usually the restoration of the Roman past and Roman tradition, as defined in a variety of different ways by successive contenders.
Before proclaiming himself emperor, Galba had claimed to be the Legate of the Senate and people, reverting to Rome' pre-monarchical republican tradition and suggesting, though not exactly promising, that he might be about to revive it. A coin of his has a variation on the restoration theme as its motif: the reverse carries the figure of Rome personified, holding a globe on which stands a tiny figure of the winged goddess of Victory who reaches out with a laurel wreath to crown her. The accompanying legend reads ROMA RENASCENS, meaning Rome is being reborn.
This is an unprecedented coin design, so put the two together and we get the idea of the particular character of the rhetoric being used by and about Galba during his brief period of office. It suggests that Galba is the one who will restore Rome to her pristine state, and bring her new victories to match the old. This is a rhetoric of newness, but it is not a rhetoric of change. It is newness in terms of a return to the old ways and the good old days, just the sort of thing Romans liked to hear.
The next usurper, Otho, employed what superficially was an odd tactic when he came to power. He actually went out of his way to stress his affinities with Nero, using public art and architecture as part of his programme. This was not, in fact, as extraordinary as it might at first appear. Nero had been deeply unpopular with many senators but not with the army or the people. Like Nero, who was 30 when he died, and unlike the aged Galba who was 71, at 36 Otho possessed the attraction of youth which, since Alexander the Great, had been recognised as a desirable quality in a new ruler. According to Suetonius, in his Lives of the Caesars, Otho was hailed as Nero coming to power and was reported to have signed his name as Nero on documents (Suetonius, Life of Otho 7).
Otho had Nero's public statues and images re-erected, and paid for the completion of his notorious palace the Domus Aurea (Golden House), constructed on the runs of the great fire of Rome in AD 64. He also reportedly intended to marry Statilia Messalina, Nero's widow. All of this might simply be attributed to a deep streak of misguided megalomania in Otho, but no doubt expected in one who aspired to be Roman emperor.
There is good reason to believe that much of Otho's Neronian revivalism was designed and conscious, aimed at appealing to those sections of the urban populace and the army who still held Nero's name in high regard. Like Claudius, and Galba eventually, Otho too adopted the names of Caesar and Augustus that no emperor could dispense with. Both of these titles can be seen on his coins. There was, in fact, a considerable posthumous personality cult which grew up around Nero's memory, prompting the appearance of a number of impostors or false Neros.
A similarity might be loosely drawn between Nero and Elvis Presley in this respect. Both died relatively young, both were (great) musicians and performers, both lived in extraordinary houses (the Domus Aurea as a kind of Roman Graceland), and both were allegedly seen on several occasions after their deaths.
The coins of Otho also tell us something more about his public image. The obverse shows him as a young man, not quite as young as Nero, but no dissimilar in other respects. The reverse has a figure of Pax, goddess of Peace, who is surrounded by the legend PAX ORBIS TERRARVM, the Peace of the whole world. Again, this is not simply a pretty picture, it has meaning and its implication is that Otho is the man who will put a stop to the civil wars and restore peace to the world. Peace, of course, for the Romans was not merely the absence of war, it meant peace through military victory over one's enemies.
The Roman verb connected with the word pax, pacare, means to pacify in the sense of to conquer by force of arms. Nero had issued coins with the reverse type of the temple of Janus, shown with its doors closed to signify that no wars were being waged throughout the Empire.
Finally, Vitellius. His first approach to the problem of his public image was to try to establish himself in the Romans' mind as part of a great dynasty. His father had been a great general and politician in the AD 40s, and he had two children, all of whom were mobilised in his public imagery to suggest that the emperor was the right man for the job, and that he had turned the position into a settled family business, so as to lessen the chances of someone else doing what he had done. The problem faced by all usurpers was, of course, that they could not undo their own example. This is why they had to seek elsewhere for legitimisation and or validation. In Rome it was to the Senate and to public opinion, particularly that of the army. Vitellius was also portrayed as the restorer of Libertas, political liberty, a very important concept for Romans, and not just those at the top of the social ladder.
The Roman Republic had prided itself on its liberty, in contrast to other peoples who were slaves to kings and tyrants. The compromise that all Romans had to make under the emperors was between liberty and monarchy. Could they continue to believe that they were living in a free state when that state was plainly governed by one man? Many of them clearly could, but the success of this necessary delusion depended very much on the behaviour of the emperor. Nero had infringed on the liberties of the Senate by murdering too many senators and acting like an arbitrary tyrant rather than the leader of a free people.
So, he was removed, not by the senate as a body but by individual senators in charge of large armies rebelling against him. His downfall was a lesson to his successors of the limits of an emperor's power which Vitellius, at least on the evidence of the coin, seems to have learnt. The reverse of the coin shows Liberty holding in her hand the Cap of Liberty (a symbol picked up much later by the Jacobins in Revolutionary France), and around her the legend reads LIBERTAS RESTITVTA – Liberty restored. Vitellius is presenting himself as the champion of the freedom of the Roman people, the one who has liberated Rome from the slavery imposed by his predecessors.
The restoring of the liberty of the people had been a common political metaphor at Rome for a long time – Augustus himself had used it when he took over in the 20s BC, representing himself as Champion of the Liberty of the People of Rome. The concept had gained renewed currency during the period of revolt against Nero in miod-68 when some romantics had hoped, forlornly, that his downfall might lead to the restoration of the old Republic. It was useful, therefore, for Vitellius to pick on this, as Galba had before him, and present himself as the harbinger of liberty. Much good it did him.
So, three themes – the Rebirth of Rome, the Peace of the Whole World, and the Restoration of Liberty – were all exemplified in turn by the coins of the three usurpers of AD 68-69. Just to show how little the Romans cared for change by looking at a few coins of later usurpers it is possible to trace the continuity of these ideas into later centuries. Take, for instance, the coins of Postumus. He was a Rhine frontier commander who, in AD 260, was proclaimed emperor by his troops (perhaps prompted) in opposition to the feeble and unloved emperor Gallienus. Postumus ruled what was in effect an autonomous state covering most of Germany, Belgium, France, Spain, and Britain for nine years. He set up a Senate, had yearly consuls of his own, and there was no sense in which he was anything other than a Roman emperor. His coins present him as restorer of Gaul and of the world respectively, following on from a tradition of restoration imagery that goes back, again, to Augustus – there the emperor raising the Res Publica up from her knees. As a conqueror Postumus is most vividly depicted as Hercules, the prototype of the world conqueror in Graeco-Roman mythology.
The coins of a slightly later usurper, Carausius, who took power in Britain and northern Gaul in the 280s and 290s, drew heavily of the symbolism of Rome refounded, as on the denarius showing the Wolf and Twins (Romulus and Remus) and the legend ROMANOR RENOVAT – the Restoration of the Romans. Through his coins we can see how this northern European on the margins of the Roman Empire was desperately keen to register his credentials as a Roman. Not that they were in doubt – Carausius was as Roman as any inhabitant of the city itself, but it is an illustration of just how pervasive the aura of the Roman name was. None of the Roman usurpers present themselves in public as anything other than Roman emperors.
Though Postumus' realm is commonly called the Gallic Empire, and Carausius' the British Empire, these are misnomers -these were rather Roman sub-empires. Even the famous Queen Zenobia of Palmyra, Postumus' contemporary in the 260s and 270s, struck coins on which she calls herself Augusta, and her son Vaballathus Augustus, the regular titles of the Roman emperors. She has gone down in history as an anti-Roman r ebel, and has since become a national her o for the Arabs, and particularly the Syrians, as a supposed rebel against western domination. Yet, she also had cons struck with the image of Aurelian, the so-called legitimate emperor who eventually ended up unseating her and reuniting the empire.
An enduring and binding sense of Roman-ness and an elusive but persistent notion of quasi-Republican constitutionality are what underpinned the unity and continuity of the Roman Empire in the face of continued and often prolonged periods of civil war. Paradoxically, it was these twin features that permitted the rise, indeed the proliferation, of usurpers because of the lack of dynasticism among the Romans. Anyone who could plausibly claim to be the right man to restore Rome and her ancient prowess and liberties could make a case that he should be emperor, and the claim did not always even have to be very plausible.
Take, for instance, that of Calocaerus – who held the not very exalted position of Master of Camels on Cyprus. He proclaimed himself emperor in the 320s – and Constantine the Great had him crucified. Unfortunately Calocaerus did not quite get around to striking any coins for himself, unlike Silbannacus who made coins in lead, but which are only known from the literature.
Roman-ness and constitutionality also constrained the actions of usurpers — they were not free to do as they wished. They had to abide by the rules of the imperial game. It was necessary to press the right button with the people and the army, strike the correct imperial pose, outwardly respect the increasingly notional rights and liberties of their subjects, and make coins that showed them off in the right way to the present, and to posterity.
In this last ambition, at least, they succeeded, leaving us their portraits and associated symbolism to try and make sense of, and to write history from.
