Galba had been emperor for perhaps six months when this denarius left the Rome mint, and he was already advertising a fiction. The reverse spells it out in three terse lines inside an oak wreath: S P Q R OB C S, *senatus populusque romanus ob cives servatos*, the Senate and People of Rome, for citizens saved. This was the formula of the *corona civica*, the oak crown awarded to a Roman who had rescued a fellow citizen in battle, and Augustus had quietly converted it into an honor reserved for the *princeps* who saved the Republic itself.
By striking it for Galba, the mint claimed continuity with that founding act: the seventy-year-old governor of Hispania Tarraconensis, marched on Rome with a single legion, was being presented as Augustus redux, the saviour of citizens from Nero's misrule. The laureate head on the obverse belongs to a man who would be hacked down in the Forum by Othonian soldiers within weeks of this coin entering circulation, his severed head paraded on a pole. The oak wreath outlived him by centuries on the coinage of emperors who had not yet learned, as he did, that the Senate and People could give and the Praetorians could take away.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- circa July AD 68-January 69
- Authority
- Galba
- Reverse
- shows S P Q R OB C S in three lines within an oak wreath