Adlocutio
Adlocutio This was the Roman technical term for a speech or address made by an Imperator to his troops; such as stood in the place of a modern proclamation or a general order. In this sense the word occurs only upon coins. The emperors on visiting a district or province made usually a formal speech to the troops quartered there. Such a scene is represented on the accompanying coin of Trajan and medallion of Gordian III., where the emperor, accompanied by the prefect of the camp, is addressing the army represented in an abridged form by standard-bearers.
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.