Family Aemilia
How to become a politician in Rome - Cursus Honorum
You probably noticed that both the Vestal Virgin and the Basilica share the same name, Aemilia, or Aimilia as you can see on this coin. This isn’t a coincidence, because this name is a family name. Every individual born into this family used it in a similar way, like we use family names today. Men were called Aemilius, women Aemilia. While the men had first names and sometimes hereditary nicknames too, women were usually only called by their family name. Buildings in ancient Rome, like the Basilica Aemilia, often carried the name of the family that built it and maintained it as well.
The gens Aemilia was one of the oldest patrician families in Rome. They traced their genealogy to mythical times, naming Trojan heroes as their ancestors. Many members of the gens held the highest political positions in Rome like Consul, Censor, Praetor or Pontifex Maximus. The moneyer of this coin was Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, a member of the Aemilius family. Some of you might have heard of him before. He was part of the second Triumvirate with Octavianus (Augustus) and Cleopatra's lover Marcus Antonius. But this political alliance took place only after the assassination of Caesar 44 B.C.
The coin you’re looking at is way older than that. It was issued in 61 B.C., at the beginning of Lepidus’ political career. Young men from influential families became moneyers, as it was one of the first steps of the cursus honorum, the Roman political career ladder (see also the video). In the Late Roman Republic, the time period Lepidus lived in, moneyers chose the motives and put their names on the denarius, the Roman silver coin. But they couldn’t put their own face on the coins to promote their own political career, because the Romans associated faces of living people on coins with kings. And the Romans really hated the idea of having a king.
Instead, moneyers put motives on the coins that reminded the people of the great deeds of their family. As you’ve read, Lepidus chose the Vestal Virgin Aemilia for the front of the coin. Now let’s look more closely at the motif on the back.