Servius Sulpicius Galba was seventy-one when he marched on Rome, an aristocrat of the old Republican mould who had outlived his usefulness before he ever wore the purple, and this denarius from the mint of Rome is the official face he wished to present in the brief window between Nero's suicide and his own murder in the Forum. The reverse is the giveaway: Victory poised on a globe, wreath and palm in hand, the standard vocabulary of imperial triumph deployed by a man whose only victory had been a bloodless coup against a frightened, abandoned predecessor. Galba had governed Hispania Tarraconensis for eight years in semi-retirement before Vindex's revolt drew him reluctantly into the open, and when the Praetorians killed Nero for him he inherited an empire on the cheap.
The laureate portrait, lean and unsmiling, makes no concession to flattery: this is the face of a man who refused the donative his soldiers expected, who said famously that he chose his soldiers and did not buy them, and who paid for that austerity with his head on the fifteenth of January, AD 69. Victory on her globe promised a reign. She delivered seven months.
- Mint
- Rome
- Struck
- circa July AD 68-January AD 69
- Authority
- Galba