Struck in the panicked spring and summer of 68, when Nero was still nominally emperor and Galba was technically a rebel governor, this Tarraco denarius is the coinage of a man rehearsing for a throne he had not yet been granted. The little globe tucked beneath Galba's neck is the giveaway: it claims dominion over the world before the Senate had ratified anything, and on the reverse Roma plants her foot on a matching globe, laurel branch in hand, spear at the ready. This is victory iconography produced before the victory, minted by the legate of Hispania Tarraconensis as he marched, very slowly and with much hesitation, toward a capital whose emperor would soon open his own throat. Galba was seventy years old, childless, severe, and on coins like this one he looked the part of the Republican-flavored savior the propertied classes wanted to believe in.
The reality, as Tacitus observed with his usual cold eye, was that he seemed worthy of empire until he held it. Within months of reaching Rome he would alienate the Praetorians by refusing the donative they had been promised in his name, and on 15 January 69 they would cut him down in the Forum. The globe under the neck had not lied; it had simply been premature.
- Mint
- Tarraco
- Struck
- circa April-late AD 68
- Authority
- Galba
- Reverse
- Roma standing left with right foot on globe, holding laurel branch and spear