The Image of Political Power in the Reign of Nerva, AD 96-98 by Nathan T. Elkins

Author:Nathan T. Elkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 3

Nerva and the Roman Empire

Nerva Caesar mingled things formerly incompatible: the principate and liberty.

—TACITUS, Agricola 3.1

THE MOST COMMON images on Nerva’s imperial coinage conveyed general ideas about Nerva and his administration through the depiction of personifications with their various attributes: Fortuna clasps her directional rudder and bountiful cornucopiae; Aequitas carefully holds her balance and cradles cornucopiae containing the benefits of fairness; Iustitia appropriates Pax’s olive branch and scepter to show her role in the preservation of peace and stability; and Libertas grasps the rod with which she frees slaves before presenting them with a freedman’s cap, an emblem of their new status.1 Symbols of priesthoods also appear on Nerva’s coinage to convey imperial piety. Imagery on Nerva’s coinage was not unique in its emphasis on generic ideals communicated visually through the representation of personifications and symbols. Indeed, personifications of divine qualities and ideals commonly appeared on the art and coinage of the Roman Republic and was a practice inherited from the Greeks.2 From the latter part of the first century through the third century, such images dominated the imperial coinage and also mirrored a shift in historical texts in which subjects are judged by their qualities.3 Nonetheless, the proliferation of personifications on the imperial coinage in general, and their repetition across denominations and reigns, has led modern viewers to characterize them as boring, uninteresting, or repetitive. Worse, this modernizing sentiment has been imposed upon their ancient function as some have declared them to have been meaningless and to have been relatively ineffective communicators of imperial ideology.4 But if Roman imperial coinage is to be understood as a medium of state-sanctioned art, which was above all else a visually communicative system, personifications and their associated symbols must have communicated at least as potently as “historical types” that denoted specific events such as victories, public building, monetary and grain distributions, games, and so on.5 Images of personifications communicated different things in different contexts and could have had a powerful impact on viewers and social constructs on account of their “pervasive banality” in any particular period.6 Under Nerva, contemporary writers ascribed to the emperor many of the same qualities we see heralded on his coinage: pietas, libertas, providentia, aequitas, and iustitia. The coinage thus reinforced the political rhetoric that was prominent in both text and speech during Nerva’s principate. Personifications and emblems not only successfully communicated broad imperial ideals to audiences across the Roman Empire; they were the most successful communicators precisely because of their nonspecific character that allowed the empire’s diverse population to bring its own meaning to the images according to the nature of its interface with the central regime and the sorts of benefits it received from imperial rule.

The proliferation of imperial ideals on the coins, sometimes referred to as “imperial virtues,” in the latter part of first century and in the second century reflects, as Burnett observed, the tendency in the literary culture in that era to judge a ruler by his “good” or “bad” qualities. A trope

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