2022 Cook Islands VOICE Threads of Light 24k Gold Note (Aurum)

 This stunning gold note, Voice, depicts some of the great orators within the Roman Senate, who used their voices to influence the world for the better. The message in the beautiful gold note is this: your voice is your power...use it wisely.

Reverse Side: 

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 - 43 BC) addressing the Roman Senate showcases the impact made through history by people using their voice to enact change. Cicero was a consul and senator of the Late Republic and early imperial era in ancient Rome. The composition for the scene is based on the 1888 fresco Cicero Denounces Catiline by Italian artist Cesare Maccari (1840 - 1919). The painting was inspired by Cicero’s public decrying of Catiline, who had made clandestine efforts to undermine the Republic, causing Catiline’s allies in the Senate to desert the corrupt senator. 

This rendition takes some license by replacing the Roman senators behind Cicero with representatives from different countries and other time periods. This substitution shows the long-reaching influence lawmakers and statesmen of classical antiquity had upon the world through their ideas and models of republicanism and democracy. Although this was an age often defined by military conquest, the teacher’s pen could prove mightier than a soldier’s sword, influencing the world using his voice, as attested by the Roman poet Horace in his Odes: Exegi monumentum aere perennius (I have made a monument more lasting than bronze). 

Obverse Side:

Featured are Plato and Aristotle, two of the most influential Greek philosophers of antiquity who used their voice to change the way people viewed others and the world.

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