Lugdunum Aurei
a. Aureus: obverse, bust of Augustus; reverse, bearded barbarian left, in a cloak fastened on the right shoulder, holding up a very small child stretching out its arms to Augustus at right, togate, seated on a sella castrensis on a high tribunal (CNR IV, cat. 129)
b. Aureus: obverse, laureate head of Augustus, inscribed AUGUSTUS DIVI F.; reverse, bearded barbarian left, in tunic and cloak, holding up a child, as before, to Augustus, as before, except on a low tribunal/dais, inscribed IMP. XIIII (fig. 87; BMCRE I, pl. 12.13–14)
Augustus' fourteenth acclamation as imperator dates these issues to 8/7 B.C. but the reference can only be to the event on the BR cup, which
predates these coin issues from the Lugdunum mint (Drusus died at the beginning of 9 B.C.). The date of issue means that they are part of a larger series that came out for Tiberius' triumph of 8/7 B.C., directly referred to on other types of the series. (Compare the apposition of the panel BR I:2 and the triumph of Tiberius on the companion cup BR II:2.)
The coin type represented in these two variants is unique in Roman coinage:[59] no other coin type from the Republic or the Empire shows a barbarian offering a child, or even shows the emperor togate receiving the submission of a non-Roman in a military setting. Given the closeness in time to the Ara Pacis (13–9 B.C.), a definite quotation of the BR scene in official art, I think that there is no doubt that this unique type is a deliberate abbreviation of the cup panel. This abbreviation boils down the composition to a confrontation between the emperor and the foreigner, keeping all the cup's essential elements: the emperor is togate on a sella castrensis and uses the same openhanded gesture of greeting and acceptance; the barbarian has a dignified posture (standing) and presents a child to the emperor; the child is extremely small and holds out its hands to the emperor. The better type is certainly (b ), which has the key inscriptions and gives Augustus his laurel; it is also more like the BR panel in showing the emperor on a very low dais, and so more approachable to the foreigner, who is thus allowed closer and given higher status. The foreigner's costume is also given in more detail (tunic and cloak) than on (a ) (cloak only).
For the less-perfect rendering of (a ) the artist turned without thought to earlier representational canons for victory images that put the Roman victor on a very high dais or tribunal, distanced from the suppliant, and to conventional images of beaten barbarians shown as half-naked. The basic composition of such canonical submissio scenes, where the suppliant generally kneels, accords with textual descriptions of the real-life stage management of such formal submissions, such as the surrender of the Cauchi to Tiberius in A.D. 4, narrated by Tiberius' officer Velleius Paterculus (2.104–3.106); the canonical submission type, available at least since the time of Sulla (fig. 50),[60] has been modified on this Lugdunum coinage in the same way and to the same thematic end as rex datus types, which give the foreigner being honored by Rome greater dignity, depicting him standing erect.[61]
This issue has been rightly compared to earlier triumphal issues commemorating Drusus' and Tiberius' victories for Augustus, issued from Lugdunum 15-12 B.C. (IMP. X) (figs. 115–16); for it is clear that the compositional structure or template of these earlier types in the Lug-
dunum IMP. (#) series was the direct inspiration for the structure of the later "baby" issues. In the coinage of 15-13 B.C., the standing figure(s) at left is (are) cloaked general(s), Drusus alone or with his brother, and he (they) offer not babies but laurel branches. While this parallel has been used to show that the type of 8/7 B.C. has something to do with victory and is therefore a submission,[62] it illustrates instead my interpretation. The non-Roman offering his baby is cognate with Augustus' honored stepsons offering their gifts of victory to an appreciative emperor; if one places any interpretive weight at all on the compositional borrowing, one must see the non-Roman also as a valued subject offering a gift to an appreciative emperor. This image certainly is connected to victory, but in the sense explored above in relation to the Ara Pacis, and with historical reference to Gaul's role in Drusus' and Tiberius' German campaigns, discussed below.
The Lugdunum coinage of 8/7 B.C., then, shows the BR event being advertised by means of the most wide-reaching organ of propaganda available to the state. The Ara Pacis is a parallel reference to this event, designed for an audience of the Senate and People of Rome; the coinage of the Lugdunum mint served Rome's money needs, but it also served the Roman armies and native inhabitants of Gaul and the Rhine frontier. The coin image, in other words, was made to be seen by the very armies who served with Drusus and Tiberius, in one of whose camps the cup shows this event to have taken place, and it was also designed for the Gauls, whose elite are depicted handing their children over to Augustus' protection.[63] A very good parallel is provided by the Augustan triumphal arch (ca. 20–10 B.C.) at the entrance to Glanum in southern Gaul: as P. Gros has shown,[64] on one main panel (fig. 85) a "good" Gaul in Romanized dress (his fringed sagum draped as a toga)[65] leads by a chain a "bad" savage Celt (German); on the facing panel Gallia Triumphans[66] supervises another captive. Here is the same association of Gallic support with Roman imperialism, designed for a Gallic audience as much as for a Roman one. An early imperial cuirass statue (Swiss priv. coll.)[67] uses similar imagery in what is obviously a Roman triumphal context: a "good" Celt in a sagum decorates a trophy, beside which stands a bound savage barbarian. All these images are meant to honor the real historical circumstance that Roman expansion into Germany depended in fact on the loyalty and active support of the Gauls, as dutiful taxpayers and fighting men; thus a Gallic officer walks in Tiberius' German triumph on BR I:2. This "good" and "bad" Celt imagery helps to document a broader Augustan context in which foreign contributions to Roman power were now honored by
Rome, and is the visual analogue to Claudius' famous paean to the Gauls in the Lugdunum bronze tablet; the Glanum arch must commemorate these very campaigns of the Claudii Nerones.
The visual comparanda for BR I:2 (cup, Ara Pacis, coinage) together form a complex describing a unique event by means of unique imagery. The complex offers us something like a perfectly controlled experimental group in which to observe how a given political event was singled out, on account of its contemporary political significance, to be commemorated and broadcast in a variety of artistic media, public (altar and coinage) and private (the silver cups themselves). In examining how Augustan propaganda is constructed here we can see two different phenomena or processes in operation. One is the invisible (to us) hand of some guiding organ of state (emperor and/or minister) directing and synchronizing the artistic propagation and dissemination of official imperial policy over a vast geographic expanse, aimed at every level of imperial society. The other is an artistic phenomenon, the process by which an image that narrates history can be established, expanded, abbreviated, quoted, according to the demands and limits of a given visual context. Abbreviation, as on the coins, and quotation, as on the Ara Pacis, indicate in their turn that the artists responsible thought that such allusions would work . That is, they depended on such symbols, in themselves containing incomplete information, to evoke, without recourse to verbal explanation, some pre-existing knowledge of image or event from an audience. The BR cup scene reproduces the original detailed and largely self-explanatory artistic narrative, produced to commemorate some event of major political significance. It was the knowledge both of this event and of its iconography that permitted figures isolated from the larger context to function as carriers of meaning on Augustus' altar; and where the altar invests most heavily in the figures of the children in themselves, the coins celebrate the transaction between the childrens' fathers and their ruler, appropriately enough for an image disseminated not least in the native territory of those represented.
Now, it is obvious that the imperial die cutters and sculptors did not borrow from a little silver cup. The kind of abbreviation we see on the altar in particular is evidence that the cup itself was not based directly on the altar depiction, for in borrowing, figure types tend to be conflated (as two BR children are into one Ara Pacis child) or moved out of direct informational context (as Drusus the general is separated on the altar from the child he sponsored), rather than the other way around. Rather, the cup panel, altar, and coin type all derive separately from a common source,
which they all use to different effect. This source can only have been a large-scale imperial monument with a relief (or possibly a painting) narrating the BR event, a monument that I think we can assume the BR panel reproduces faithfully. It is possible (see p. 51) that the Lugdunum coin image itself does not directly abbreviate a two-dimensional prototype but rather records a freestanding statue group related in context and chronology to the Ara Pacis and cup depictions. Like other public commemorative monuments in Rome, the prototype would have had an accompanying inscription giving further information. To hypothesize the occasion of its commission, we need to know more about the occasion it depicted.