Galba's denarius is the coinage of a man who arrived in Rome already too late. Struck at the capital between his acclamation in the summer of 68 and his murder in the Forum that following January, this silver piece (RIC I 229) shows the new emperor laureate on the obverse and, on the reverse, Roma herself standing with Victory on a globe and an eagle-tipped scepter, the full regalia of legitimate world rule. The message is conservative to the point of austerity: no dynastic invention, no novel personification, just Roma vouching for the seventy-three-year-old governor from Hispania Tarraconensis who had marched on the city after Nero's suicide.
That was the pitch, and on metal it looks unanswerable. In practice Galba alienated the Praetorians by refusing the donative they had been promised, executed senators on thin pretexts, and was cut down near the Lacus Curtius within seven months of taking the purple, the first casualty of the Year of the Four Emperors. Roma kept her Victory; she simply handed her to someone else.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- circa July AD 68-January 69
- Authority
- Galba