Servius Sulpicius Galba was seventy years old, gout-ridden, and governing Hispania Tarraconensis when the news came that Nero had named him a public enemy. Within months he was the public enemy who had won. This anonymous denarius, struck at some uncertain Gallic mint in the spring or autumn of 68, captures that improbable turn at the precise moment it was happening: the laureate, cuirassed bust of an elderly senator on the obverse, and on the reverse Victory poised on a globe with wreath and palm, as if the world itself had been handed to him. The absence of legends is itself eloquent.
These were coins struck in haste by partisans (perhaps in Vindex's orbit, perhaps under Galba's own quartermasters as he marched east) before the imperial titulature had settled, before the Senate had ratified anything, while the question of who actually ruled Rome was being answered by the legions and the mints in real time. Victory on the globe was Augustan shorthand for universal dominion, recycled here for a provincial revolt that had become, almost by accident, a dynasty's end. The wreath she offers would sit on Galba's head for barely seven months. By January he was hacked down in the Forum, and the year of the four emperors was only getting started.
- Mint
- Uncertain mint in Gaul
- Struck
- circa April-late autumn AD 68
- Authority
- Galba