In the last winter of the Roman Republic, Mark Antony struck a coin for every legion in his army — a galley on one face, an eagle between two standards on the other, and a legion's number where an emperor's head would soon go. This collection is gathering one denarius for every legion he named.
LEG X · the collection’s own
By the autumn of 32 BC the Roman world had run out of room for two men. Octavian held Italy and the West; Antony held everything from Greece to the Euphrates, with Cleopatra's Egypt behind him. War had been declared — formally against Cleopatra, because a civil war was easier to sell as a foreign one — and Antony moved his whole apparatus to Greece and settled into winter quarters at Patrae, on the Gulf of Corinth's northwest corner.
What he had with him was enormous: the sources describe a fleet of some five hundred ships and an army drawn from across the Roman East. What he did not have was money in coin. Fleets and legions are paid in silver, pay was due through the winter, and the treasure Cleopatra brought needed to become denarii — millions of them, quickly, from a mint that travelled with the army.
The answer is the coinage this page is about, and it is one of the largest single coinages the ancient world ever produced. Dio says flatly that Antony was the better funded of the two (50.18.2), and the hoards agree: comparing how often each side's coins turn up, Antony's war coinage may have been as much as ten times the size of Octavian's (Dillon, cited in Rowan). What is certain is that a century after Actium these coins still made up around a fifth of the denarii circulating in Greece, and worn examples were still turning up in hoards in the third century AD.
The reverse is the army in three objects: the aquila — the legion's eagle, the object Pliny says was made the legions' alone, whose loss was the deepest disgrace a unit could suffer — between two signa, the standards of the centuries. Above or below runs the number: LEG III, LEG X, LEG XXI, from LEG PRI (the "first legion", written out) to LEG XXIII, with a handful of legions given names as well as numbers, and two issues for cohorts that were not legions at all.
Crawford catalogues the whole series as RRC 544 — thirty-nine issues once the variants are counted, struck "at a mint moving with Antony," conventionally placed at Patrae. Nineteen-plus legion numbers, struck at speed, on flans that were often a little ragged, from dies cut by hands of very mixed skill: this is money made under pressure, and it looks it. That is a large part of its appeal. This is not a medallion for a triumph; it is a pay packet for a war that was about to be lost.
One romantic idea has to go, though: the hoards show the different legion types thoroughly mixed together — the Actium hoard is 93% legionary denarii, of assorted legions — so the coins were almost certainly paid out at random, not each legion with its own number (Keppie). The Tenth was not paid in LEG X. The numbers were the army's portrait, not its payroll ledger.
Analysis puts the legionary denarii at about 92.2% silver against 96.84% for Octavian's contemporary issues. The easy story is that a desperate mint stretched the metal — but the likelier explanation, Rowan argues, is more interesting: 92% is roughly the fineness of the cistophori, the local silver standard of the Roman East where this army had been paid for years. Antony's mint was conforming to the money his soldiers already knew. Either way the difference was invisible to the eye — and either way, the market found it out.
Bad money drives out good: the legionary denarius is the ancient world's best demonstration of Gresham's law, three centuries long.
Because everyone eventually knew these coins ran a little light, everyone spent them and hoarded something else. So the good coins vanished into the ground and the legionary denarii stayed out in the world, doing work, for three hundred years — rubbed slick, tested with banker's punches (the collection's LEG III carries one), and still officially acceptable currency into the Severan era. When Marcus Aurelius' treasury officials pulled worn silver from circulation in the 160s AD, legionary denarii were still coming in through the door. The extreme case is the Shapwick villa hoard from Roman Britain, buried in the third century AD with 260 legionary denarii in it — many worn nearly to blank discs, two hundred and fifty years' work showing on their faces.
The fuller story of Rome's silver — where Antony's ninety-two percent sits on a six-century slide — is told in this site's The Silver Goes Bad; the banker's punches these coins so often carry have their own page in Test cuts and bankers.
This is the collection's standing project: one legionary denarius for every legion Antony named — the twenty-three numbered legions, plus the two cohort issues as extra credit. Bronze-ringed discs are coins in the collection; the engraved discs are still wanted. Each slot links to its coin's page here, or — for the legions still missing — to the type's page in the American Numismatic Society's Coinage of the Roman Republic Online.
LEG IIIRRC 544/15 · possibly III GallicaIN THE COLLECTION
LEG IIIIRRC 544/16WANTED
LEG Vpossibly V Alaudae, the LarksWANTED
LEG VIthe legion of the AD 169 restorationWANTED
LEG VIIRRC 544/20WANTED
LEG VIIIRRC 544/21WANTED
LEG IXRRC 544/23WANTED
LEG XRRC 544/24 · the name Caesar madeIN THE COLLECTION
LEG XIWANTED
LEG XIIalso struck as XII ANTIQVAEWANTED
LEG XIIIWANTED
LEG XIVWANTED
LEG XVWANTED
LEG XVIWANTED
LEG XVIIalso struck as XVII CLASSICAEWANTED
LEG XVIIIalso struck as XVIII LYBICAEWANTED
LEG XIXWANTED
LEG XXWANTED
LEG XXIRRC 544/37the scarce high numbersWANTED
LEG XXIIthe scarce high numbersWANTED
LEG XXIIIthe last of the numbered seriesthe scarce high numbersWANTED
CHORTIS SPECVLATORVMRRC 544/12 · the scouts and couriersrareEXTRA CREDIT
CHORTIVM PRAETORIARVMthe praetorian cohortsrareEXTRA CREDIT
It is tempting to read the wall as a muster roll of famous names — but honesty first: most of Antony's numbered legions cannot be securely matched to the named legions of the later empire. Both Antony and Octavian numbered their legions from I upward, so in 31 BC there were two Legio VIs, two Legio Xs, and so on, facing each other across the Ambracian Gulf; after Actium the victor amalgamated, renumbered and resettled, and the threads tangle. The identifications scholars do argue for — Keppie's work is the standard treatment — are flagged on the wall as "possibly," and left there.
| Issue | What can actually be said |
|---|---|
| LEG PRI | The "first legion," written PRI rather than I — and scarce, perhaps because the honorific first legion existed more on paper than in the line. |
| LEG III | Sometimes linked to III Gallica, raised by Caesar in Gaul, which fought for Antony at Philippi and in Parthia. In the collection. |
| LEG V | Plausibly V Alaudae, "the Larks" — Caesar's Gaulish legion, whose men wore lark's wings on their helmets. |
| LEG VI | The number both warlords held: Antony's VI became Ferrata, "Ironclad," in the East; Octavian's became VI Victrix. Two hundred years later it was LEG VI that the emperors chose when they re-struck this coinage (below). |
| LEG X | The number Caesar made famous — his favourite, the Tenth, whose men he once shamed back into line by addressing them as "citizens." Whether Antony's X contained those veterans is exactly the kind of thread that cannot be pulled tight. In the collection. |
| XII ANTIQVAE · XVII CLASSICAE · XVIII LYBICAE | The three legions given names on the coins themselves: "the Old Twelfth," "the Fleet Seventeenth," "the Libyan Eighteenth" — unit pride cast in silver, and all three scarcer than the plain numbers. |
| CHORTIS SPECVLATORVM | The corps of scouts, couriers and — the word's later career — secret police of the headquarters. Its reverse swaps the aquila for three naval standards decorated with rostra: a fleet army's badge. Rare (Crawford 544/12). |
| CHORTIVM PRAETORIARVM | The praetorian cohorts — the commander's guard, a generation before Augustus made the name notorious. Rare. |
| The high numbers | LEG XXI, XXII and XXIII are the scarce end of the series: the highest-numbered formations were the smallest issues. The collection's want list flags these specifically. |
On 2 September 31 BC the fleets met off Actium, and by the following summer Antony and Cleopatra were dead in Alexandria. The army the coins had paid mostly never fought: legion after legion went over to Octavian or surrendered in place, and the victor faced the oldest post-war problem — too many legions, all owed land. Antony's men and Octavian's were demobilised and settled side by side; some of Antony's formations were kept whole under new management; the doubled numbers were resolved, untidily, into the imperial army list.
And then the best documented irony in the whole story: Octavian appears to have paid his own discharged veterans with Antony's money. At Ateste — a colony Octavian founded for his veterans — a hoard closed under Augustus contains fifty of Antony's legionary denarii against just two of Octavian's own contemporary issues. The victor had captured the loser's treasury, and re-striking it was a losing proposition: improve the debased silver to Rome's standard and you end up with fewer coins than you started with. So the coins of the erased man kept flowing — from the hands of the state that erased him (Dillon, cited in Rowan). It helped that the war had officially been against Cleopatra, and that these coins carried no portrait to be embarrassed about.
The coins outlived the army. And then, two hundred years to the year after Actium, the coinage received the strangest compliment in Roman numismatics: in AD 169 Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus issued a restoration of the legionary denarius — same galley, same eagle and standards, marked LEG VI, with ANTONIVS spelled out in full so that no one would read the abbreviated name as their own dynasty's "Antoninus." The reverse adds ANTONINVS ET VERVS AVG REST — “restored,” the same abbreviation emperors put on rebuilt temples; Rowan's phrase is exact: the coin was restored as a monument (RIC III Marcus Aurelius 443). An emperor-philosopher reminting the coinage of the man Augustus had erased: partly a gesture to the Sixth's own bicentennial pride, partly an admission that after two centuries the old legionary denarii were still such familiar money that their replacement had to look like them.
Where the argument is still open: the identification of Antony's numbered legions with later imperial legions is contested throughout and presented here as such; the size of the original issue is a modern estimate, not an ancient figure; and the mint is "Patrae(?)" in every honest catalogue — a mint moving with an army leaves no address.