November 13, 2025, 6 pm
5th Heinrich-Dressel-Lecture
We are pleased to invite you to the 5th Heinrich Dressel Lecture, part of the joint lecture series organized by the Academy projects Imagines Nummorum and Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum in cooperation with the Coin Cabinet of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.
The lecture will take place on Thursday, 13 November 2025, at 6:00 p.m., in the Lise-Meitner-Saal, Unter den Linden 8. Once again, it will address a numismatic topic:
All Roman emperors claimed to guarantee peace, prosperity, and internal as well as external security throughout the empire, and to secure the goodwill of the gods. Yet, since their actual scope of action was limited, they sought through various communicative efforts to create at least the impression of omnipotence and omnipresence, thus meeting their need for public acceptance. The stability and continuity of the Roman Principate depended on ensuring that imperial messages and strategies of legitimation reached as many social groups as possible: the Senate, the equestrian order, and the populace of the city of Rome; the provincial, regional, and local elites; the urban population and, to a lesser extent, the rural population in the provinces; and the army stationed throughout the Roman Empire.
These imperial acts of communication can be traced and studied across all ancient media: in archaeological monuments of every kind, in the formulae and wording of inscriptions, papyri, and legal texts, as well as in the imperial coinage. The latter will be the focus of the lecture by Hartwin Brandt (Otto-Friedrich-University of Bamberg), who will present exemplary coin types from Augustus to Constantine.
Author: Ulrike Peter