Lily Ross Taylor on “The Contribution of the Coinage to the Study of Caesar’s Dictatorship and Deification”

Abstract

At the heart of this essay is the transcription of a collection of Lily Ross Taylor’s unpublished notes. These were first presented at a colloquium held at Bryn Mawr College in November 2019 as a memorial to the fiftieth anniversary of her death. As presented here, they provide her view of the coins as evidence for Caesar’s aims between 49 and 44 BCE and for his later deification. They also clearly articulate her methodology for using numismatic sources in historical research. A short introduction attempts to put these notes in their scholarly context and points toward Miss Taylor’s planned work, much of it uncompleted at the time of her death.