Faces of power : imperial portraiture on Roman coins : [catalogue

This introduction to Imperial Roman history and numismatics accompanied an exhibition held at the Nicholson Museum, University of Sydney, in 2007. This exhibition uses coins to reflect on some few of the millions of stories that make up the history of Roman emperors.It stretches from the prototype emperor Julius Caesar to the last Roman emperors in the West and their contemporaries in Constantinople.Coins, like statues, give a physical face to power, sometimes realistic, sometimes idealised, not only of emperors, but also of those whose faces on coins show their importance in the physiognomy of power.What was shown on the coinage and what we now know happened in reality were often very different, but the coin image expressed an idea that the emperor wanted to be believed.During the Roman Republic, and in the early days of Empire, the magistrate in charge of the production of coinage would add his own name to the legend. This practice does not seem to have continued on imperial coinage after the reign of Augustus.Octavian (Augustus) created a new praenomen for himself, Imperator, or 'victorious general'.During the reign of Nero, Imperator ('emperor') began to be used as the first name for all Roman rulers.After the cognomina, successive agnomina could be adopted to further identify individuals within a family.