Seven months. That is roughly how long Servius Sulpicius Galba sat on the throne before the Praetorians cut him down in the Forum, and yet the mint at Antioch managed to push out tetradrachms in his name in respectable numbers, this McAlee 303 among them: a stern laureate profile with a star floating before the face, the reverse carrying the eagle on thunderbolt with wings spread and a palm frond at the side, the standard Syrian formula inherited from the Julio-Claudians and pushed back to Augustus and beyond. The star is the detail worth pausing over. On Antiochene silver it had long signalled divinity, the sidus Iulium that announced the deified Julius and by extension the celestial sanction of his heirs, and here it hovers beside a seventy-year-old Spanish governor who had been hailed imperator by his troops and adopted by the Senate after Nero opened his own throat.
Galba needed that star. He was the first emperor in a century who could not claim Augustan blood, and the eagle of Zeus on the reverse, palm of victory beside it, was doing the same work the star was doing on the obverse: insisting that this elderly aristocrat with no dynasty behind him was the legitimate continuation of something, anything. The coin survives in quantity. The regime did not.
- Mint
- Antioch
- Struck
- AD 68-69
- Authority
- Galba
- Reverse
- Eagle standing left on thunderbolt with wings displayed and palm frond to left