In April 68, a seventy-year-old governor of Hispania Tarraconensis declared himself the legate of the Senate and Roman people and started striking coins, which is to say he started a civil war. This denarius from Tarraco is one of the first products of that gamble: GALBA IMP on the obverse, the laureate head with a small globe tucked at the neck (a quiet claim to world rule before any such thing existed), and on the reverse VIRTVS herself, holding Victory on a globe and the short parazonium of a general in the field. The legend is a single word because a single word was the entire argument. Nero was still alive when the dies were cut, still emperor in Rome, and Galba had no army worth the name beyond a hastily raised legion and the loyalty of a few governors who would shortly hedge their bets.
Calling on Virtus was not decoration but recruitment, an appeal to the old Republican virtue that a soldier-aristocrat could still claim against a stage-singing princeps. The argument worked for about seven months. By the following January, Galba lay dismembered in the Forum and the Year of the Four Emperors was properly underway, but the iconographic vocabulary minted at Tarraco, austere personifications, terse legends, the Senate invoked as ballast, would be borrowed by every usurper who came after him.
- Mint
- Tarraco
- Struck
- Struck circa April-late AD 68
- Authority
- Galba
- Reverse
- Virtus standing left, holding Victory on globe and parazonium