Julius Caesar's 44 BCE Denarius: The Coin That Helped Get Him Killed

The silver coin in the Smithsonian’s National Numismatic Collection is small, about 19 millimetres across, and it carries the face of a man who had weeks to live. On one side is Julius Caesar, head turned to the right. On the other is Venus, holding a small figure of Victory in one hand and a sceptre in the other. It was struck in Rome in 44 BCE.

That doesn’t sound radical. Rulers put their faces on money all the time. But Romans didn’t, and that’s the whole point.

Denarius of Julius Caesar, 44 BCE. National Museum of American History, National Numismatic Collection, Smithsonian Institution (CC0).

A face Rome wasn’t supposed to see

For centuries Roman coins showed gods, personifications, and the dead. A moneyer, one of the junior magistrates who ran the mint each year, might honour a famous ancestor on a coin to promote his own family. What he would not do is put a living man on the front. Living faces on coins belonged to the Hellenistic kings of the East, the successors of Alexander. In Rome the word for king, rex, had been an insult since the monarchy was thrown out around 509 BCE.

In January 44 BCE the Senate voted Caesar the right to appear on the coinage anyway. Four moneyers went to work that year: Marcus Mettius, Lucius Aemilius Buca, Publius Sepullius Macer and Gaius Cossutius Maridianus. Their dies track Caesar’s titles almost month by month. The early coins call him DICT QUART, dictator for the fourth time. Then IMP. By February the legend reads DICT PERPETVO. Dictator for life.

Every Roman who handled one of these coins could read that. Silver denarii paid soldiers and changed hands in markets across the Mediterranean. The mint was telling the whole Roman world that the emergency office the Republic handed out for six months at a time now belonged to one man for good.

Venus and the family business

The reverse is doing its own work. Caesar’s family, the Julii, claimed descent from Venus through Aeneas and his son Iulus. Putting the goddess on the back, holding Victory, turned a family legend into state imagery. The winner of the civil war was also, according to the coin, the descendant of a god.

February brought the Lupercalia, when Mark Antony offered Caesar a royal diadem in public and Caesar pushed it away. Plenty of people watching assumed the refusal was theatre. The coins in their purses said the same thing the diadem did.

On 15 March 44 BCE Caesar was stabbed to death at a meeting of the Senate in the Theatre of Pompey. The conspirators said they were saving the Republic from a king. The portrait denarii were part of their evidence, and they had been circulating for a matter of weeks.

Brutus learned the lesson backwards

The postscript is almost too neat. Two years later, raising an army in the East, Marcus Junius Brutus struck his own denarius. The reverse shows a freedman’s cap between two daggers above the words EID MAR, the Ides of March. The obverse shows Brutus’s own portrait.

The man who helped kill Caesar for acting like a king put his living face on a coin to pay for his war. Octavian and Antony beat him at Philippi in 42 BCE. After that nobody seriously asked whether a living Roman belonged on the money. The emperors just did it, for the next five hundred years.

So this little coin marks the exact point where the rule broke. It’s worth looking at the face on it for a while. It’s the first of thousands.