The pileus and two daggers on the reverse are not a subtle image: this is the Ides of March, restruck for a new tyrant's fall. Galba issued this denarius from Tarraco in the spring of AD 68, in those uncertain weeks after he raised the standard of revolt against Nero in his Spanish province but before the Senate, and the Praetorians, decided he was emperor rather than a rebel. The borrowing from Brutus's famous EID MAR denarius is shameless and entirely the point: the freedman's cap between the assassins' blades had been the visual shorthand for liberation from a tyrant for over a century, and LIBERTAS RESTITVTA, Liberty Restored, with P R for Populus Romanus straddling the cap, makes the claim explicit.
Galba is offering himself not as Nero's successor but as his executioner by proxy, the instrument by which the Roman people recover what a Caesar had taken. The conceit had a short life. Within eighteen months Galba lay dead in the Forum, his head carried on a pole by a camp follower, and the Year of the Four Emperors would demonstrate exactly what kind of liberty the legions now bestowed.
- Mint
- Tarraco
- Struck
- April-June AD 68
- Authority
- Galba
- Reverse
- Pileus between two vertical daggers with P R across the field