Roma strides off this little disc of silver as if she owns the future, Victory perched on a globe in her hand, spear couched for business, and that is precisely the point. When Galba struck this anonymous denarius at some still unidentified mint in Spain in the spring or summer of 68, he did not yet have Rome. He had a province, a reputation for old fashioned severity, and the nerve to declare himself, in the wake of Vindex's revolt, legate of the Senate and Roman People against a Nero who was suddenly, astonishingly, finished. The lack of any legend at all is itself a statement: these earliest issues, the so called "military" or "anonymous" types, speak in pure image, addressed first to the soldiers whose loyalty had to be bought with silver before it could be commanded by name.
The globe at the point of Galba's neck and the globe under Victory's foot rhyme deliberately, promising a world in the right hands again, while Roma's forward motion supplies the verb the legends omit. It is the visual grammar of restoration, struck by a man marching on a capital that had not yet decided whether it wanted him. Within a year the Rhine legions would decide it did not, and the iconography of confident advance would pass, with the silver, to Otho.
- Mint
- Uncertain Spanish mint
- Struck
- circa April-late AD 68
- Authority
- Galba
- Reverse
- Roma advancing right, holding Victory on globe and transverse spear