Commodus AV Aureus. Rome, AD 190-191. M COMM ANT P FEL AVG BRIT P P, laureate, draped and cuirassed bust right / HERC COM P M TR P XVI COS VI, Commodus as Hercules, standing left, holding cornucopiae in left hand and sacrificing with patera in right hand over lit altar against which leans club;tree, on which hangs lion-skin and quiver of arrows, to left. RIC 221d; C. -; BMCRE -; Calicó 2257. 7.23g, 21mm, 1h.

Good Very Fine; well-centred, with lustre around the devices. Extremely Rare.

Ex Morris Collection, Heritage Auctions, NYINC Signature Auction #3071, 7 January 2019, lot 32129.

By AD 190 the growing megalomania of Commodus had permeated all areas of Roman life, as is witnessed in the material record by his coinage and the innumerable statues erected around the empire that had been set up portraying him in the guise of Hercules. The literary accounts that survive from writers such as Dio Cassius and Herodian paint a picture of Commodus' infatuation that might be disbelieved if it were not for confirmation from so much physical evidence. However, there can be no question that late in his life Commodus believed Hercules was his divine patron, and that he worshipped him so intensely that eventually he came to believe himself an incarnation of the mythological hero, reinforcing the image of Commodus as a demigod who, as the son of Jupiter, was the representative of the supreme god of the Roman pantheon.

Struck in the last years of Commodus' reign, the reverse of this superb aureus is full of the symbolic allusion to Hercules with which the Emperor had surrounded himself in the latter part of his reign, and although the pose of the figure depicted is that of the youthful genio populi Romani with cornucopiae and patera, this image is also clearly bearded and therefore conceivably that of another version of Commodus' Hercules. The coin depicts familiar instruments of the hero, such as the club and quiver with arrows, as well as the lion-skin he is traditionally presented with. In myth, Hercules fashioned his knotted club from a wild olive tree that he tore from the soil of Mount Helicon and subsequently used to kill the lion of Cithaeron when he was only 18 years old. An alternative suggestion, however, is that the lion-skin is supposed to be that from the Nemean lion that he killed for the first of the twelve labours, while the quiver of arrows alludes to Hercules' sixth labour, the shooting of the Stymphalian birds.

Further mythological imagery is also evident: the figure appears to have an apple in the patera he holds, as well as the cornucopiae in his other hand. The apple makes reference to the eleventh of the twelve labours which Hercules undertook, in which he was to steal the golden apples that Hera had given to Zeus as a wedding gift and were guarded by the Hesperides. During this labour, Hercules had to take the sky on his shoulders to relieve Atlas, who was the father of the Hesperides and could therefore persuade them to give up the apples. However, as property of the gods the apples had to be returned to the garden from which they had been removed, a task that Athena completed on Hercules' behalf. Perhaps then the figure seen sacrificing on this reverse is in the act of passing the apple back to the gods for return to the Garden of the Hesperides.

An account of the origin of the cornucopiae can be found in Ovid's Metamorphoses (9. 87-88), which tells us that Hercules fought the river-god Achelous for the hand of the nymph Deianeira. Finding that he was no match for Hercules, Achelous resorted to turning himself into other creatures, and it was whilst in the form of a bull that he was finally thrown to the ground by Hercules and overpowered. During this final moment of the tussle Hercules tore a horn from the head of Achelous, which was given to the Naiads and transformed into the cornucopiae.