Denarius of Julius Caesar

No living Roman had ever been featured on a Republican coin until this denarius issued by Gaius Julius Caesar. The motivations behind this extraordinary act remain debated to this day. However, what is not debated is the immediate response from the aristocracy. Just one month after its issue, Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March by senators in the Curia of Pompey. Many of the conspirators had been pardoned by Caesar during the Civil War, were personal friends, and had even been named as heirs in his will. The betrayal was thus personal, poetically encapsulated by Shakespeare’s famous last words: “Et tu, Brute?”

Caesar’s accession to perpetual dictatorship has been viewed as the inevitable outcome of a Republican system that had, for half a century, enabled the rise of strongmen, with Marius and Sulla as predecessors and Pompey as merely the latest rival. Caesar’s downfall, however, was the result of his own hubris. During his quadruple triumph, it escaped no one’s notice that his “foreign” conquests in Africa, Spain, and Egypt were thinly veiled victories over fellow Romans. He revived the dictatorship so infamously abused by Sulla— not for the customary limited term, but in perpetuity. Later, he “refused” a crown that Mark Antony offered him but only when the crowd reacted unfavorably. Caesar’s final act of placing his image on coinage— an emulation of monarchs and tyrants—ultimately provoked the Senate to action.

After his death, Caesar’s body was burned on a pyre in the Forum. Later, when a comet appeared in the sky, Octavian declared it evidence that Caesar had ascended to the heavens, and a temple was erected on the site in honor of the Divine Julius. The ruins of this temple still stand in the Roman Forum, where visitors today leave flowers at the spot of his cremation.

Ave, Caesar.