blaidan: March 2016

More Later Republican Denarii

Quintus Pomponius Musa

As we saw in a previous blog post, exactly a year ago, on 20th March, 2015, moneyers of the later Republican period exercised considerable freedom in designing the coinage and changed the designs every year, using the post as an opportunity to publicise an ancestor or indeed whatever took their fancy.

The topic of this post is the series of coins issued by Quintus Pomponius Musa in 66BC (date according to Crawford, Harlan dates the issue to 65BC).

While some moneyers went on to achieve fame or infamy in later life, Q. Pomponius Musa is unknown aside from his coins. The gens Pomponia was an ancient Roman family, claiming descent from Pompo, a son of Numa, Rome's second king. In any case, our Q. Pomponius Musa seems have issued coins featuring the Muses because muse rhymes with Musa.

Nine Muses are featured, each engaged in the activity for which she was known in the ancient world, plus Hercules. So far, I've managed to acquire four of the Muses, plus Hercules; so, my collection is half-complete :)

The obverse of the coins is generally said to feature Apollo, with a different symbol associated with the Muse on the reverse, but Harlan claims that it's not the head of Apollo but a generic Muse. I'd tend to agree with this, as the head is quite feminine, even for Apollo. The coin featuring Hercules does have the head of Apollo on the obverse. Apollo is normally regarded as the leader of the Muses, but in Rome there was a temple with statues of the nine Muses in the temple of Hercules - the statues of the Muses were taken as booty from the Greek city of Ambracia following its surrender to the Romans after a siefe in 189 BC. The consul Fulvius Nobilior took over 1000 statues from the city and paraded them through Rome in his triumph in 187 BC. At the same time as dedicating the statues of the Muses, Nobilior seems to have moved a shrine to the Camenae, obscure Goddesses which had become associated with the Muses, to the temple of Hercules. This shrine had originally been dedicated by Numa, claimed ancestor of the Pomponii. Harlan speculates that our Pomponius was associating his family with an original shrine of the Muses.

I've mentioned Crawford and Harlan in this post; next time, I'll give a bibliography for Roman Republican coins which will give an idea of what to read for more information.