Roman Coin Minted as a Salute to Julius Caesar's Assassination Is Up for Auction
On the March 15, 44 B.C.E., a group of senators stabbed to death the dictator Julius Caesar on the floor of the Roman Senate. Following the assassination, the infamous Roman politician Marcus Junius Brutus is said to have minted the coin to mark his key role in the murder and to celebrate Rome’s freedom from tyranny.
A rare golden coin, one of just three known specimens in the world, is likely to tempt buyers with deep pockets at auction later this spring. Experts estimate that the historical coin could sell for as much as $2 million when it goes on the chopping block in Zurich. Known as the “Eid Mar” or the “Ides of March,” the coin bears a heroic portrait of Brutus with the inscription BRVT IMP, which casts him as a military victor. He minted several of these coins in silver and gold in Greece, where he fled shortly after killing Caesar and launching ancient Rome into a civil war.
“In an era when communication through the media was virtually nonexistent, coins were the most important means of political propaganda and this coin is an excellent example of it,” Russo adds, speaking with Joe Dziemianowicz of Barron’s.
Their boastful coin may have marked a high point of good feeling among Caesar’s assassins. In the years that followed, Caesar’s successor Octavian spent the next decade hunting down the men who had stabbed Caesar to death on the Senate floor 14 years earlier, as Ted Scheinman reported for Smithsonian magazine in 2020. Brutus himself died by suicide in 42 B.C.E. after Octavian’s and Mark Antony’s armies defeated his own forces at Philippi.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-ancient-coin-was-minted-to-celebrate-julius-caesars-murder-180979743/
