Galba was seventy when he marched on Rome, a stiff-necked aristocrat of the old school who treated the legions like recruits and the Senate like a recovering patient, and on this denarius from the Roman mint, struck in the few months between Nero's suicide and his own murder in the Forum, he reaches past a century of Julio-Claudian rule to claim a grandmother who was not his. The reverse shows DIVA AVGVSTA, Livia herself, patera and scepter in hand, the matriarch whom Claudius had finally deified in 42 and whom Nero had quietly let fade. Galba's connection was thin, a matter of family favor and a legacy in her will that Tiberius had refused to pay, but in the summer of 68 thin was all he had.
With no blood tie to the Caesars and nothing but the loyalty of the Spanish legions behind him, he reached for the one Julio-Claudian everyone could agree to revere: the dignified, dynastically unimpeachable Livia, whose virtues a stern old republican could plausibly claim to revive. The pose is hieratic, the message austere, and the gamble characteristic. Within six months the Praetorians would cut him down for being exactly the kind of man this coin advertises.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- circa July AD 68-January 69
- Authority
- Galba