Would there be a specific victory in mind, or just the general sense of "here we are doing what winners do"?
Hard to say. One would have to investigate when exactly the
type appeared, and what wars were being fought or completed at the time. The
type was used by
Galba,
Vitellius,
Vespasian,
Domitian,
Trajan,
Antoninus Pius, and
Marcus Aurelius. See
Schmidt-Dick, Typenatlas I, pp. 82-3.
According to
Strack,
Trajan p. 125, this
type commemorated the formal termination of a war, rather like closing the doors of the
Temple of Janus. I don't entirely follow
his reasoning. According to
Woytek, Trajan's
Pax igniting arms
type didn't appear until 111, four years after
his second Dacian triumph of
sommer 107. That date is certainly correct, because the
type is found not only dated
COS V, but also
COS V DES VI (late 111) and
COS VI (1 Jan. 112 on).
