Triton XIX, Lot: 436. Estimate $3000. Sold for $5500. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee.

The Triumvirs. Octavian. Autumn 30-summer 29 BC. AR Denarius (21mm, 3.65 g, 9h). Italian (Rome?) mint. Bare head right / Naval and military trophy facing, composed of helmet, cuirass, shield, and crossed spears, set on prow of galley right; crossed rudder and anchor at base; IMP CAESAR across field. CRI 419; RIC I 265a; RSC 119. Superb EF, attractively toned with traces of electric blue and gold iridescence, hairline die break and area of light deposit on obverse.

The reverse of this denarius depicts a Roman naval and military trophy. Known in Latin as a tropaeum from the Greek τρόπαιον, it typically consisted of the helmet, cuirass, and shields of a defeated enemy arranged on a tree trunk with arm-like branches. Arranged around its base were additional arms and sometimes bound captives. Here, in place of the additional arms and/or captives the trophy sits on the beak (rostrum) of an enemy warship with a rudder and anchor at its base.

This denarius was part of a series of aurei and denarii that were struck between the autumn of 30 BC and 29 BC and which conveyed a general message of victory and refoundation. Sear associated this denarius with a contemporary aureus showing on its reverse a similar trophy housed in a tetrastyle temple decorated with a triskeles in its pediment. The obverse of that coin, a bust of Diana Siciliensis, led him to argue that the aureus commemorated Octavian’s important victory over Sextus Pompey at the Battle of Naulochus in 36 BC. The reverse of this denarius, however, is more ambiguous, by leaving the specific victory unspecified. The most likely possibility is that it commemorates Agrippa’s victory over Antony and Cleopatra at Actium the previous September, the final triumph for Octavian, the undisputed master of the Roman Empire.