CONCORDIA PROVINCIARVM, the reverse insists, the harmony of the provinces, and the claim is almost touching given how briefly that harmony would last. This denarius, struck at some uncertain Gallic mint in the convulsive months after Vindex raised his standard against Nero, is a piece of revolutionary propaganda dressed in the calm vocabulary of the old Republic. Servius Sulpicius Galba, the elderly governor of Hispania Tarraconensis, had been hailed imperator by his troops in April 68, and the legend SER GALBA IMP CAESAR AVG P M TR P shows him already wearing the full titulature of a Caesar before he had even reached Rome. The Concordia on the reverse, branch in one hand and cornucopia in the other, is the message his backers wanted broadcast: this was not a Spanish usurpation but a concerted rising of the western provinces, Gaul and Spain acting in concert to deliver Rome from a tyrant.
The truth was messier. Vindex had already been crushed at Vesontio by the very Rhine legions whose loyalty Galba would now need to buy, and the concordia advertised here was a wish more than a fact. Within seven months of his accession Galba would be dead in the Forum, hacked down by Othonian cavalry, and the provinces whose harmony this coin proclaimed would spend the next year tearing the empire apart in the bloodiest succession crisis since Actium.
- Mint
- Uncertain mint in Gaul
- Struck
- Struck circa April-late autumn AD 68
- Authority
- Galba
- Reverse
- Concordia standing left, holding branch and cornucopia