of personal titulature that accompany the images – AVGVR, PONT, and so on- anticipating later imperial styles where the title of pontifex maximusappears con-
tinually, conventionally abbreviated to P M.
As in the case of the temples, so the variable adoption in the provinces and beyond
of the Roman habit of depicting sacrificial scenes and implements on coins is of
particular interest, as it may assist in charting the spread not necessarily of Roman cul-
tic practice itself, but of the symbolic attraction of its things. On the coins of Verica,
a king in pre-Roman southern Britain in the early first centuryad, there appear a
number of motifs from the Roman religious repertoire including an altar, a temple
with a cult statue, and a figure seemingly holding a lituus(Creighton 2000: 80 –125;
J. Williams 2005; fig. 11.16). There is little archaeological evidence for the adop-
tion of the material culture or architecture of Roman religion in Britain before the
conquest. But its symbols had already begun to exert a considerable fascination on
the minds of some Iron Age Britons. On the provincial coins of early imperial Spain,
various combinations of apex,lituus,simpulum, patera, jug, knife, and axe appear
at a number of cities (fig. 11.17). This has been plausibly interpreted as an indica-
tion of a desire among the provincial cities of Spain to assimilate the things and
symbols of Romanness (Burnett 2005: 178). In the east, by contrast, such symbols
are to be found only at Antioch in the first centuryad (RPC1.4171, 4178), where a
range of other unusually western-style features are also present, including the use of
Latin legends on the city’s bronze coinage down to the reign of Nerva (ad96 – 8;
fig. 11.18).
152 Jonathan Williams
Figure 11.16 Ancient British silver coin of Verica, early first century ad, showing a
naked figure holding a lituus. 11 mm.
Figure 11.17 Bronze coin of Carthago Nova, Spain, mid-first century bc, with Roman
priestly symbols. 20 mm.
Figure 11.18 Silver didrachm from Syrian Antioch in the reign of Claudius (ad41–54),
showing the young Nero and Roman priestly emblems. 18 mm.