Half of a Neronian Mirror

354, Lot: 509. Estimate $150. Sold for $140. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee.

Nero. AD 54-68. Æ Sestertius (33mm, 15.33 g). Plate soldered to smoothed obverse to create a mirror / Roma seated left on cuirass, holding Victory and parazonium; arms around. Half of an ancient mirror; see Triton XVII, lot 655 for a complete mirror. For similar mirrors, see Paul–André Besombes, “Les miroirs de Néron,” RN 153 (1998), pp. 119-40. Good Fine, brown patina with areas of green and red.

Neronian mirrors, either styled after sestertii or made from actual coins such as the present specimen, were first studied by W. Froehner in 1889 (“Grands–Bronzes de Néron transformés en miroir,” ASFN 13) and since that time our understanding of why they were made has advanced little. Besombes argued that the mirrors, at least those of his Type I with an outer rim as lot 655 in Triton XVII, were distributed at events such as games or concerts and were part of a larger Neronian religious policy. The mirrors, he posits, evoke the celestial sphere with the concentric circles mirroring the way the ancients divided the sky. Of course, at the center of the mirror/celestial sphere we find the image of the emperor, who we can associate with Sol/Helios, the center of the universe. While touching on very interesting ideas, such a theory is very speculative. Nero, no doubt, made efforts to associate himself with Sol/Helios (of course, Nero’s Colossus of the deity at Rome carried the features of the emperor), but the author’s arguments are not entirely convincing in their attempts to apply Nero’s religious policy to such mirrors. Perhaps the reason we have not yet made sense of these objects is simple – fashion trends do not always make sense.