Denarius Sulpicia: Servius Sulpicius, SER SVLP

Servius Sulpicius Rufus, the moneyer responsible for this issue, is almost certainly the same man who became one of Rome's most distinguished jurists — a legal theorist so respected that Cicero, his close friend, wrote a famous consolatory letter to him on the death of Tullia. The 51 BC date places the issue squarely in the last chaotic decade of the Republic, just as Caesar was completing his Gallic campaigns and the Senate was fracturing along irreconcilable lines.

The Sulpicia gens traced ancestry to Servius Tullius, the sixth king of Rome — a lineage these coins implicitly invoked.