The oak wreath on the reverse of this denarius, the *corona civica*, was the highest civic honor Rome could bestow: granted to a man who had saved the lives of citizens. Galba, struck here at the Rome mint between his accession in July 68 and his murder in the Forum the following January, wants you to read him as exactly that kind of savior. The legend SPQR OB C S, *Senatus Populusque Romanus ob cives servatos*, "the Senate and People of Rome, for citizens preserved," is the formula Augustus had appropriated almost a century earlier and stamped onto his own coinage after Actium. Galba, a seventy-year-old aristocrat hauled to the purple by the legions of Spain after Nero's suicide, was advertising a restoration: the Senate restored to dignity, the citizens delivered from a tyrant, the Augustan compact renewed. The bare head on the obverse, austere and unflattering, with the bony jaw the sources mention, completes the program.
He is not Nero. He is the *princeps* as the Senate would have designed one, had the Senate ever been allowed to design one. Within six months the Praetorians, unpaid and unimpressed, cut him down and handed the empire to Otho, and the year of four emperors was properly underway. The wreath on the coin had promised lives saved; the man wearing it could not save his own.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- circa July AD 68-January 69
- Authority
- Galba
- Reverse
- shows S P Q R and OB C S in two lines within an oak wreath