Galba was seventy when he marched on Rome, a gouty aristocrat with a reputation for parsimony and an outdated sense of Republican virtue, and the coinage struck in his brief seven months of power has the unmistakable air of a man insisting on his own credentials. This denarius from the Rome mint, issued between July 68 and his murder in the Forum in January 69, presents on the reverse a naked Virtus standing with parazonium and spear: the personification of soldierly courage, manliness in its hardest sense, the quality Galba claimed to embody when he rose against Nero from his governorship in Tarraconensis. Coming from a man whose chief political asset was supposed to be old Roman austerity, the choice was pointed.
Virtus was what the legions wanted to see, and what Galba, having refused the donative the Praetorians believed they were owed for installing him, conspicuously failed to translate into the only currency they cared about. Tacitus delivered the verdict that has stuck: capax imperii nisi imperasset, equal to ruling had he never ruled. The Virtus on this coin is the self-image; the body hacked apart at the Lacus Curtius was the audit.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- circa July AD 68 - January AD 69
- Authority
- Galba