Thanks
Curtis for giving me homework.
Kleiner agrees with
Tacitus. He suggests that the arch most likely spanned the
clivus Capitolinus as it lead from the Asylum to the Capitolium, in line with other arches dating back to the Republic and it was likely the last arch one passed before reaching the temple of
Jupiter.
No traces of the arch have ever been found.
Kleiner suggests that the arch was either completely destroyed shortly after Nero's death with the
damnatio memoriae Nero received when the senate proclaimed him an enemy of the state or in one of the two fires that consumed the Capitoline
hill in 69 and 80.
Kleiner's article was an attempt to reconstruct the Arch of
Nero, not an attempt at a corpus of the coinage, though he did conduct a die study of the
Rome and
Lugdunum coins available to him. Kleiner's thought was that the earliest dies would most faithfully represent the arch and therefor be the most useful in
his reconstruction. The die study revealed that the earliest issues were indeed more detailed in their depiction of the arch than the later issues.
Kleiner also shows that the
Lugdunum issues are only copies of either coins or drawings supplied from
Rome and are not reliable in their details. As the issues procede, the engravers became more careless and proportions change and details come and go, each succesive issue being just a copy of the coins or dies from the earlier issue.
Kleiner suggests that the arch may stood not far from the
mint on the Arx at the Temple of
Jupiter Moneta so the initial engravers may have used the arch itself as their model.
As I said,
Kleiner was attempting to reconstruct the arch, not provide a corpus of the arch
sestertii. Whether
Kleiner was aware of the Balkan
mint issues or chose to ignore them as being too far removed to be at all reliable I don't know. He doesn't mention anything other than the
Rome and
Lugdunum issues.
Barry Murphy
