When this denarius left the dies at Tarraco, Galba was not yet emperor in any settled sense: he was a seventy-year-old governor of Hispania Tarraconensis who had been hailed *imperator* by his legions and was waiting, with the cold patience that characterized him, to see whether Rome would have him. The little globe tucked beneath the truncation of his laureate bust is the giveaway, a quiet claim to world rule struck before the Senate had ratified anything, and on the reverse Roma herself comes striding forward with Victory in her palm and a spear in her fist, as if the city were running to meet her new master rather than the other way around. It is a confident piece of metal for a man whose authority still rested on the loyalty of a single province and the suicide of Nero somewhere off in the distance.
Tarraco was, for these few months, effectively the capital of the Roman world, and the mint there was working out the visual grammar of a regime that had to invent itself from scratch. Galba would be dead in the Forum by mid-January, his head carried about on a pole, and the year of four emperors would grind on without him; but in the spring of 68 the dies were cut for a man who genuinely believed Rome was coming to him on foot.
- Mint
- Tarraco
- Struck
- circa April-late AD 68
- Authority
- Galba
- Reverse
- Roma advancing right, holding Victory and spear