Salus, the personification of Public Welfare, plants her foot on the globe and pours wine onto a flaming altar: a tidy promise of safety restored, struck by a man who would be dead within months. This denarius of Galba (RIC I 214, Rome, between his arrival in the capital in the summer of 68 and his murder in the Forum that following January) belongs to the brief moment when a seventy year old governor from Hispania Tarraconensis had succeeded in unseating Nero and presented himself as the empire's physician. The rudder in Salus's hand promises steerage; the globe under her foot, command of the world; the sacrifice, piety renewing the state. It was a careful program, and on the metal it almost works.
In practice Galba arrived in Rome trailing executions, cancelled the donatives the Praetorians had been promised, and treated the senate with the chill of a man who had already decided he was its better. Otho was watching, Vitellius was being acclaimed on the Rhine, and the Year of the Four Emperors was already underway. Salus, on this little disc of silver, looks competent and unhurried. The man who issued her had run out of time before the dies were even worn.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- circa July AD 68-January AD 69
- Authority
- Galba
- Reverse
- with right foot on globe, sacrificing from patera over a lighted and garlanded altar while holding a rudder