Servius Sulpicius Galba was seventy when the legions of Spain finally talked him into rebellion, and the tetradrachm struck at Antioch in his name carries the face of a man who had spent a long career waiting and a very short reign discovering that waiting had been the easy part. The bare head on the obverse is unflattering in the Antiochene manner, lean, beaky, every year visible, while the reverse keeps to the Syrian template that had served Nero and would serve Otho and Vitellius after him: an eagle on a wreath, wings spread, wreath in beak, palm frond at its side, the vocabulary of legionary victory pressed into civic silver. The exergue reads ΕΤΟΥΣ Β, year two, which in the regnal arithmetic of Antioch means the second year from Galba's acclamation, a year he did not live to finish; he was cut down in the Forum on 15 January 69, his head carried about Rome on a pole by a camp follower who wanted the bounty.
The eagle and palm were meant to announce that the new princeps held the loyalty of the eastern legions. They did, briefly. Within eighteen months those same legions would have hailed three more emperors, and the Antiochene mint would simply swap the portrait and keep striking.
- Mint
- Antioch
- Struck
- AD 68-69
- Authority
- Galba