Word and Image, Mobility and Displacement: Vercingetorix in Coinage (15 min)

Presenters

Marsha McCoy, Southern Methodist University

Abstract

Two striking issues of coinage, one Roman, one Gaulic, both contemporaneous with each other, appear at the end of Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul. One, the well-known Roman denarius issue of 48 B.C.E. (RRC 448/2a) shows on the obverse the bust, most likely of Vercingetorix, at the time imprisoned in Rome awaiting display in Caesar’s triumph before his execution. The other issue, a Gaulic coin minted in 52 B.C.E. by Vercingetorix on the eve of his final defeat by Caesar at the Battle of Alesia, displays on the obverse an idealized Hellenic bust similar to portraits of Alexander the Great on Greek coins, a type that the Gauls, long mercenaries for Macedonian armies, were familiar with. Around this bust, however, inscribed in Roman letters, is the name of Vercingetorix himself. This is the first use of words in a Gaulic coinage issue, and, as it displaces the usual pictorial representations of Gaulic carnyces, and the rest depicted on previous coinage, it represents, I argue, a shifting view of Gaulic coinage by the Gauls, aimed now at a Roman audience instead of a local population in its imitation of the lettering/names used on Roman coinage. On the other hand, Roman denarii heretofore almost always depict the goddess Roma on the obverse, in conventional and stylized representations typical for a goddess, even as Roman sculptural portraiture of the late republic is renowned for its realism and expressiveness. Now, with the Vercingetorix denarii of 48 B.C.E., Roma is displaced and replaced with the famous defeated Gaulic chieftain, with his haggard features, scraggly beard, and disheveled hair, a portrait as realistic as the fine sculptural portraits of distinguished Romans of the same period. This noteworthy shift from stylized divinity to realistic human on a widely circulated Roman issue reflects, I argue, just as the lettered Vercingetorix coinage from Alesia does, the political, social, geographic, and demographic movements and displacements in Gaul and the Roman republic at the time, as Gaul is subdued and colonized by the Romans once and for all, and the Roman republic enters its final stage of civil war, collapse, and transformation.