A new emperor reaching for an old ghost: that is what this denarius from Tarraco is doing. Galba, the seventy-year-old governor of Hispania who marched on Rome in the summer of 68 to end Nero's reign, struck this coin in the provincial mint that had bankrolled his revolt, and on its reverse he placed not a personification, not a victory, not a legion, but Livia herself, the Diva Augusta, patera and scepter in hand. The choice was pointed.
Livia had been Galba's patroness in life, leaving him a fortune in her will (a fortune Tiberius reduced and Nero, characteristically, never paid out), and by reaching past the entire Julio-Claudian disaster to attach himself to its founding matriarch, Galba was advertising a return to Augustan sobriety after Nero's gilded excess. The globe at his neck on the obverse makes the claim plainer still: world rule, legitimately inherited, by the man Livia had favored. It was a coherent program, elegantly argued in silver, and within six months of reaching Rome Galba would be cut down in the Forum by the Praetorians he had refused to bribe.
- Mint
- Tarraco
- Struck
- AD 68-69
- Authority
- Galba
- Reverse
- Diva Julia Augusta (Livia) standing left, holding patera and scepter