Servius Sulpicius Galba was seventy-one years old when he became emperor, a flinty senatorial grandee hauled out of Spain on the strength of a military revolt against Nero, and the denarius he struck at Rome between summer 68 and the first weeks of 69 wears that biography on its sleeve. The reverse shows Virtus, manly courage personified, planted facing the viewer with her head turned and a parazonium (the short ceremonial sword of a senior officer) in one hand and a spear in the other. This is not the supple Pax or smiling Concordia of a settled regime; it is the iconography of a man who came to power at the head of a legion and wanted everyone to remember it.
Galba's brief reign was an exercise in austere self-presentation: no donative for the praetorians who had abandoned Nero for him, executions of suspect officers, a parsimony his contemporaries read as senile meanness. By 15 January 69 the Forum would see his head carried on a pole, and Otho would be emperor before nightfall. Virtus, it turned out, was not enough.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- circa July AD 68-January 69
- Authority
- Galba