CNG CNR January 2019

Q Pomponius Musa and His Coinage Nine beautiful maidens stand nervously in the stage wings waiting to perform, each swathed in a long gown and holding the instrument of her respective talent. Giving each young lady a musical introduction is a boisterous and musclebound Master of Ceremonies, wearing a lion skin headdress and strumming a lyre. Watching the proceedings, coolly aloof, sits the androgynous judge, crowned with a laurel wreath.

An ancient beauty pageant or talent show? This might be how Quintus Pomponius Musa envisioned the famous temple called the Aedes Herculis Musarum as he walked through it in the mid first century BC. The statues within the temple were set up to reflect the attributes of each Muse. Remnants of that temple survive. (Interestingly, the concept of a temple to the muses has been recreated at the Getty Villa in Malibu California. The images of the statues within this article are from the Getty Villa.)

While we can only speculate on what Musa envisioned when he decided to create his enigmatic coin series, we know his coinage concept was inspired by the “relocated” statues from Ambracia. The images on the coins must surely have been taken from these statues. The detail is too great to have been mere speculation. These remarkable coins are so attractive and mysterious that now, more than twenty centuries later, his silver denarii are still among the most avidly sought and collected coins of the Roman Republic.

Although the moneyer Q. Pomponius Musa is otherwise unknown to history, his coins have made his name as immortal as the deities they depict. He was born into the Pomponia gens, a prominent plebeian family in Rome who claimed descent from Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome. His choice of Hercules Musarum and the nine Muses as coin types is clearly a punning allusion to his cognomen of Musa. This article will try to explain the various aspects of this coinage, which are known, unknown, and often in dispute.

The series of ten silver denarii, depicting Hercules playing the lyre and his young charges, the Muses, is almost certainly based on a celebrated statue group by an unknown Greek artist that was looted by the Roman general M. Fulvius Nobilior from the city of Ambracia during his war against the Aetolean League in 189 BC. A lover of Greek culture and art, Fulvius is said to have taken the statues to Rome because he learned in Greece that his patron god Hercules was a musagetes (leader of the Muses).

Fulvius had them placed in a specially constructed shrine, the Aedes Herculis Musarum (Plin. NH xxxv.66; Ov. Fast. vi.812), dedicated in 187 BC. So, it was already quite old when Q. Pomponius Musa was elected as a moneyer, one of three men chosen to supervise Rome’s minting of coins, in the 60s or 50s BC. Remains of this temple have been found in the area of the Circus Flaminius close to the southwest part of the circus itself, and northwest of the porticus Octaviae. An inscription found nearby, ‘M. Fulvius M. f. Ser. n.

Nobilior cos. Ambracia cepit’ (“M. Fulvius Nobilior, son of Servius, Consul, brought this from Ambracia”) may have been on the pedestal of one of the statues.

While it might seem unusual that Hercules would be shown as musically inclined, it is perhaps more curious that he would be associated with the Muses at all. Michael Harlan, in his book on Roman Republican moneyers, speculates the statue of Hercules playing the lyre just happened to be among those of the Muses taken from Ambracia. He speculates it was this chance transportation grouping that caused the statues to reside together in what would become the Herculis Musarum. According to Livy, the number of statues removed to Rome during the Roman sacking of Greece totaled over 1,000.

That there are nine muses in the Herculis Musarum is somewhat a result of timing. Their respective talents were also an evolving subject in Greek mythology. Diodorus writes: “The majority of myth writers, especially the most esteemed, say that they were daughters of Jupiter and Mnemosyne. But a few of the poets, among whom is Alcman, declare them to be daughters of Uranus and Ge (Heaven and Earth). Likewise, they disagree even about their number, for some say there were three, others say nine. The number nine has won out, having been established by the most famous men, I mean Homer and Hesiod and other such poets. To each of them, men attribute a special disposition for pursuits related to the arts, for example, poetry, 4