Thanks for the link, Joe, though unfortunately there is little that is new or original in Mlle. Girod's paper. She just recites well-known facts about Agrippina's life and career and repeats well-known interpretations of the
Roman imperial coin
types in which
Agrippina appears.
Two bloopers. 1. She assigns the
rare sestertius of
Agrippina II with
reverse Carpentum, no
legend, to the
mint of
Rome, and considers it an important document of Agrippina's political preeminence late in Claudius' reign, since her
obverse legend is in the nominative case, and she gets the
Carpentum reverse while
still living and before becoming priestess of the deified
Claudius. However that
sestertius was actually struck in
Thrace, along with the
sestertii of
Britannicus and of
Nero as
Caesar. Agrippina's
types were copied from the
sestertii struck by
Caligula for
his mother
Agrippina I after her death; that's where the nominative
legend and
carpentum rev. type came from, not from any declaration or reflection of
Agrippina II's power at
Rome!
2. She thinks the second person in the
elephant car on the
reverse of the
aurei and
denarii of
Nero and
Agrippina in 55 might be not
Divus Augustus, as traditionally stated, but rather
Fides Praetorianorum, the Loyalty of the Praetorians. This, she says, is the interpretation of J.-B. Giard, which she approves (p. 7, note 45). However surely she should have been aware that that is not Giard's interpretation, but my own, set forth in my very detailed paper on the early gold and silver coinage of
Nero in
Numismatische Zeitschrift 1982. In
his second edition of
RIC I, pp. 148-9,
Sutherland called attention to my paper, and summarized some of my conclusions, including my reinterpretation of the second figure in the elephant-car
type. That's where Giard got the idea, though he failed to acknowledge
his source. Yet apparently Mlle. Girod
had not read Sutherland's appendix to
his RIC introduction to
Nero, as she certainly
had not read my paper, which she never mentions and does not list in her bibliography, though it contains very substantial treatments of the three earliest gold and silver
types of Nero's reign, the exact subject of the last four pages of her published paper!
Forum de numismatique classique en Francais
