Galba had been emperor for perhaps six months when this denarius came off the dies at Rome, and rather than parade his armies or his consulship he chose to put Livia on the reverse, patera in one hand, scepter in the other, looking every inch the Augusta she had been a half century before. The choice was pointed. Galba's connection to the Julio-Claudian house ran through Livia herself, who had favored him as a young man and, according to Suetonius, left him fifty million sesterces in her will, a bequest Tiberius reduced to nothing and Caligula refused to honor.
By raising her image now, with her cult restored and her divinity emphasized, Galba was reminding Rome that he was not some Spanish usurper trailing legions behind him but the heir, in spirit and in patronage, of the woman who had made the Principate work. It was a careful argument made in silver, aimed at a senatorial audience that wanted continuity dressed as restoration. The argument did not save him; within weeks of the latest possible striking date he was cut down in the Forum by Othonian cavalry, the first emperor to learn that the secret of empire, as Tacitus would later put it, was that one could be made somewhere other than Rome.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- circa July AD 68-January AD 69
- Authority
- Galba
- Reverse
- Livia standing left, holding patera and scepter