Galba, seventy-three years old and freshly hauled to the purple by the legions of Spain, chose to introduce himself to Rome by reaching back fifty-nine years to a dead empress. The reverse of this denarius (RIC I 224, struck at Rome in the half-year between Nero's suicide and Galba's own murder in the Forum) shows Livia standing with patera and scepter, labeled simply DIVA AVGVSTA, while the obverse legend IMP SER GALBA CAESAR AVG P M parades the new princeps in full titulature. The choice was neither sentimental nor accidental. Livia, deified by Claudius in 42 and quietly sidelined by Nero, had reportedly favored the young Galba personally and left him a substantial legacy in her will, a bequest Tiberius had blocked and Caligula spent.
By placing her on his coinage at the moment he claimed the principate, Galba was doing several things at once: advertising a personal tie to the Augustan house for a man whose own pedigree was Republican rather than Julio-Claudian, repudiating Nero's neglect of his great-grandmother, and casting himself as the restorer of an older, sterner Rome where the founder's widow had presided over the domus. It was a careful piece of political theater from a man whose other gestures, parsimony with the Praetorians chief among them, would prove rather less well calibrated. Within months the soldiers who had made him would cut him down, and the coin became a memento of the shortest restoration in Roman history.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- circa July AD 68-January 69
- Authority
- Galba
- Reverse
- Livia draped standing left, holding patera in right hand and long scepter in left