The most commonly accepted interpretation of
Caesar’s
elephant coin is the
Good over Evil theme. In
Christian art the
Virgin Mary is depicted stepping on the
snake. This is a representation of the fulfillment of Genesis 3:15 where God tells Satan, the
snake, that the seed of the woman would crush
his head. The readily recognized figures of Mary, Jesus’ mother, and the
snake, Satan, make it easy to see how this
Christian image can be interpreted as the triumph of
Good over Evil, but do the figures of
elephant and
snake on
Caesar’s coin conjure up a similar idea in the pagan mind? There are no ancient myths that tell of a fight between an
elephant and
snake, but Pliny in
his Natural
History records a story about a battle between a python and an
elephant. However, in this battle both the
elephant and the python die, there is no
victor. If the
elephant and the
snake are to be interpreted as an allegorical representation of the
victory of
good over evil, the
snake has to be seen as evil and the
elephant as
good and the
elephant must win. The
snake is the biggest problem with this interpretation. Did the pagans see the
snake as evil just as the Christians did? Although there are a number of myths involving evil snakes killed by heroes, the
snake was never associated with the fall of
man and never became demonized like the
snake in the Garden of Eden. Snakes were more commonly associated with
good things such as
fertility,
health (
Salus), and rebirth in the pagan tradition. The
snake was simply not an iconic symbol of evil to the pagan mind. It was the Christians who looked at the pagans worshipping the
snake and labeled it Satanic worship. Would the pagan see the
elephant as an iconic symbol of
Good? Here there is nothing at all to suggest that the pagan associated the
elephant with goodness. The only way we can get there is to assume that the
elephant represents
Caesar who put
his name on the coin under the
elephant (obviously
good since he was minting the coin). But of the two
animals on the coin, the one that the pagan mind would most easily associate with
good things is the
snake. Is
Caesar the
snake? Again, we have to ask what the people of
his own time would be most familiar with, not what we are familiar with. The two most common explanations that make
Caesar the
elephant are etymological and historical: 1) the name
Caesar derives from caesai, (possibly a Punic word for
elephant) and 2) a tradition that the first
Caesar had killed an
elephant in battle. Quite simply the origin of the name was unknown even to the ancient
Romans and the
Historia Augusta gives four versions of the etymology, so it is hard to believe that the
average Roman would make the association that the
elephant is
Caesar. It is the
inscription CAESAR in the
exergue that has led to the modern
identification of the
elephant as
Caesar. But the
exergue is the traditional place for the moneyer’s name and
Caesar is separated from the
field by the ground line. When Hirtius minted, he put
his own name there. Presumably the Caesarian message remained the same with or without
CAESAR inscribed on the coin. So whatever that message was, it
had to be using
symbols easily recognized by the people he was speaking to. The main problem with a
Good over Evil interpretation is that the
snake was not a symbol of evil in the pagan
Roman mind. As for the
elephant, the most frequent use of the
elephant on coinage
had been by the Metelli. Of all the families of
Rome they
had done more to connect their name with the
elephant image than any other family line. And Metellus
Scipio himself even used the
elephant again (without
snake, of course) after
Caesar minted
his coin.
As others have pointed out, the other
side of the coin with the implements of the
pontifex maximus makes an unmistakable reference to
Caesar with or without the name
Caesar. But that also got me to thinking. Why did he want to advertise that position? Simply put, the main concern of the
Roman state religion was the
Salus of the state, hence it was
Caesar’s chief concern as
Pontifex Maximus. If the Metellan
elephant was trampling on the
Salus of the state, it was
his duty as
Pontifex Maximus to protect and restore
Salus.