Salus, the personified well-being of the Roman state, plants her foot on the globe and pours a libation over a garlanded altar: it is a confident image, and the man who issued it had perhaps six months to live. This denarius (RIC I 211, struck at Rome between July 68 and the first weeks of 69) belongs to the brief reign of Servius Sulpicius Galba, the elderly senator who marched on Rome from Spain after Nero's collapse and became the first emperor in nearly a century not descended, however tortuously, from Augustus. The reverse program is a careful piece of reassurance. The rudder under Salus's hand says the ship of state has a steersman again, the foot on the globe claims universal reach, the sacrifice promises piety restored after Nero's excesses.
Galba was selling stability, and the Roman world, exhausted by the final Julio-Claudian months, wanted to buy. What it got instead was a tight-fisted septuagenarian who refused the customary donative to the Praetorians ("I levy my soldiers, I do not buy them," Suetonius has him say) and who was cut down in the Forum on 15 January 69 by the very guard whose loyalty Salus was supposed to guarantee. The Year of the Four Emperors had begun, and the rudder passed from hand to bloodied hand three more times before Vespasian closed it.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- circa July AD 68-January AD 69
- Authority
- Galba