Galba came to power on the back of a slogan and a gamble, and this denarius, struck at Rome between his arrival in the capital in the summer of 68 and his murder in the Forum that January, shows him still trying to look the part. The laureate head is that of a seventy-year-old senator who had spent decades waiting his turn, and the reverse offers Roma herself standing in for any further argument: she balances Victory on a globe in one hand and grips an eagle-tipped scepter in the other, the visual grammar of legitimate, victorious, world-spanning rule. The trouble was that Galba had won nothing on a battlefield.
He had been hailed by the Rhine and Spanish legions as an alternative to Nero, then walked into a city already exhausted by civil expectation, and his answer to the soldiers who had made him was to refuse the donative they thought they had been promised. A coin that insists on Roma and Victory is doing real political work when the man on the obverse has neither. Tacitus delivered the verdict everyone has quoted since: by common consent capable of ruling, had he never ruled.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- circa July AD 68-January AD 69
- Authority
- Galba