Gold aurei of the Twelve Caesars

Roman

On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 169

The coins are mounted in a matching pair of nineteenth-century gold bracelets that are also decorated with oblong amethysts en cabochon. The jewelry may have been fashioned by the firm of Castellani in Rome and was inspired by the early second-century A.D. writer Suetonius' biographies of the first twelve rulers of imperial Rome, which started with Julius Caesar and ended with Domitian. One bracelet contains aurei of the dictator Julius Caesar and the Julio-Claudian emperors Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, the other has coins of the emperors of the civil war in A.D. 69—Galba, Otho, and Vitellius—and the Flavian emperors Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian.

Gold aurei of the Twelve Caesars, Gold, amethyst, Roman

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