L'aureus au zodiaque d'Hadrien, première image de l'éternité cyclique dans l'idéologie et l'imaginaire temporel romains

Careful examination of the zodiac aureus of Hadrian in the historical context of its issuing allows us to appreciate the intervention of the emperors in the sphere of the Roman temporal imagination. The figure which holds the zodiac and bears in its left hand a globe surmounted by a phenix is neither Aion, nor Magnus Annus, nor Annus, nor the emperor himself, as has been supposed. Rather, it is the «  Golden Eternity  » - SAECfulum] AVRfeum], as written in the inscription - inaugurated by Hadrian when the empire had recovered its stability. Our study shows how the word saeculum had come to mean «  eternity  ». We note that to the spatial equivalence established between the empire and the Cosmos from the reign of Trajan was added, with the aureus of 121, a temporal equivalence which likened the eternity of Rome no longer to the succession of lineary centuries but to the endless progression of cosmic cycles. Furthermore, from the references to the phénix and the use of the word Aion - which had a different meaning in this period for «  Hellenes  » and Christians - we gain an insight into the religious and ideological undercurrents of Hadrian's choice of coinage. In their laudations of the Cosmos the sophists of the Antonine period continually compared its eternity to that of Roman rule, exhorting the inhabitants of the empire to respect in their civil relations the values of orderliness and concord bound up with the Law of cosmic harmony which insured the eternity of the Universe. Viewed in this way, it is impossible to think that the choice of this coinage had anything at all to do with pedantry.