Celestial bodies ON ANCIENT COINS

Archaeological evidence points to various beliefs in how planetary motions affected individual lives, political events and sometimes entire nations. When the heavens were unpredictable, what the ancient people saw would leave a strong impact, they sought explanation. Elements of astronomy and astrology often translated on coins, especially in ancient Rome. Unpredictable occurrences such as eclipses, meteors or comets were regularly associated with great people and eras in Roman history.

THE ZODIAC ON COINS

To understand how ancient Romans interpreted celestial bodies, we must first refer to the written sources. In scholarship, the findings on ancient Roman beliefs in astrology and knowledge of astronomy is transferred to us from writers of the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. Around 30-40 AD, Roman poet Marcus Manilius wrote his poem ‘Astronomica’ in five books, focusing on various celestial phenomena, meaning of the signs of the Zodiac, all underlined with the understanding that the universe is governed by reason (Lat. ) and overseen). According to Manilius, the universe consists of two spheres. One is the Earth and one is the so-called firmament, a sphere of stars, which is hollow. He explains that the constellations are fixed, the Earth is stationary and the so-called firmament revolves around it, accounting for the movements of the stars observed from the Earth. The planets, the Moon and the Sun were thought to revolve around the Earth, as the majority of the ancient astronomical systems were geocentric. Manilius interpreted constellations as signs of the Zodiac and wrote about their powers in great detail. The Zodiac signs were thought to have Roman gods as their protectors and each was assigned the rule over different parts of the human body. The signs were even thought to be able to influence the length of one’s life; they were considered profound omens in the Roman society.