Galba was seventy-one years old when he marched on Rome, and the face on this denarius does not flatter him. The laureate head is austere, jowled, the neck thick and creased: the portraitist of the Rome mint in 68 was not interested in selling a young Caesar to the legions. On the reverse stands Virtus, helmeted, holding the short ceremonial sword called a parazonium and a spear, the personification of soldierly courage that any usurper following Nero needed to claim.
Galba had built his bid on exactly this currency. Governor of Hispania Tarraconensis, hailed by his troops, marching east while the Senate scrambled to declare Nero a public enemy, he arrived in the capital as the first emperor not of the Julio-Claudian house, the man who proved, in Tacitus's brutal verdict, that an emperor could be made somewhere other than Rome. Virtus on the reverse was the virtue he most needed his soldiers to believe he embodied, and the one whose absence, when he refused the donative they expected, would get him cut down in the Forum within seven months of taking the throne.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- A.D. 68-69
- Authority
- Galba
- Reverse
- shows Virtus standing, holding parazonium and spear