Denarius - Domitian IMP VIIII COS XI CENS POT P P, Minerva

The tribunician and consular numbering on this coin dates it precisely to 85 AD, the year Domitian assumed the office of perpetual censor — censura perpetua — a title he used to justify sweeping control over senatorial rolls and public morality. No emperor before him had claimed the censorship as a permanent personal office rather than a temporary magistracy. The constitutional audacity of that move, more than any military campaign, defined the increasingly autocratic character of the reign that Suetonius and Pliny the Younger would later savage in print.