Concordia on a Galban denarius is an act of wishful thinking cast in silver. Struck at a Gallic mint in the frantic months of AD 68, when the elderly governor of Hispania Tarraconensis was lurching toward Rome at the head of a rebellion that had somehow worked, this coin (RIC I 107) shows him laureate and cuirassed, a soldier's emperor in the making, while the reverse offers Concordia with her branch and cornucopia, the goddess of harmony promising that the civil war just opened would close as quickly as it had begun. It was a promise the coinage of every Julio-Claudian successor would have recognized, but in 68 it had to do unusual work: Nero was dead by his own hand, Vindex had already fallen at Vesontio, the Rhine legions were sullen, and the man on the obverse was a septuagenarian aristocrat whose claim rested on the acclamation of provincial troops and the convenient suicide of his predecessor.
Concordia here is less a description than a prayer, and within months of Galba's entry into Rome the Praetorians would cut him down in the Forum and hand the purple to Otho. The branch and the cornucopia outlasted the man by a season.
- Mint
- Gaul
- Struck
- circa April to late autumn AD 68
- Authority
- Galba