Galba had spent his life being competent, and competence at last had its reward: in the summer of 68, after Nero opened his own throat in a suburban villa, the elderly governor of Hispania Tarraconensis rode into Rome as emperor. This denarius, struck at the capital between July and the following January, shows him already settled into the role, IMP SER GALBA CAESAR AVG ringing a laureate head that the dies render with unflattering honesty: the long jaw, the thin mouth, the sagging neck of a man past seventy. The reverse offers the program in a single figure, Virtus standing with parazonium raised and spear grounded, the soldier's manliness as the regime's advertised virtue. It was the right message and the wrong one.
Virtus had carried Galba from Spain to the Palatine on the back of the Rhine and Iberian legions, but once installed he refused the donative those same legions expected, dismissed his German bodyguard, and lectured the army on discipline as if Rome were still a republic of frugal men. By the second week of January the Praetorians had cut him down in the Forum, his head paraded on a pole, the spear and short sword on this coin transferred, in effect, to other hands. The Year of the Four Emperors had its first corpse, and Virtus, it turned out, was a quality the troops preferred to be paid for.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- ca. A.D. July 68-January 69
- Authority
- Galba
- Reverse
- Virtus standing facing, holding parazonium upwards and leaning on vertical spear