The oak wreath on the reverse, with its terse abbreviation S P Q R OB C S, is the *corona civica*: the wreath awarded for saving the lives of Roman citizens, and by AD 68 the most loaded political symbol Galba could possibly have reached for. Augustus had received it from a grateful Senate in 27 BC and put it on his coins for the rest of his reign; every emperor since had inherited the conceit that he stood between Rome and slaughter. Galba, striking this denarius at Tarraco in the chaotic spring and summer of 68 while Nero still lived or had only just opened his veins, was making a precise claim. He, the elderly governor of Hispania Tarraconensis, was the one who had saved the citizens, from a *princeps* the Senate would soon declare a public enemy.
The obverse legend piles on the legitimacy he did not yet quite possess (IMP CAESAR AVG P M TR P, the full Augustan stack), and the small globe at the point of the neck hints at universal dominion. It was a confident program for a man who had been hailed *imperator* by his own troops and was gambling that the Senate would ratify what the legions had improvised. The gamble paid, briefly. Within seven months of reaching Rome, Galba was hacked down in the Forum by Othonian cavalry, and the wreath that had saved the citizens passed to the next claimant in line.
- Mint
- Tarraco
- Struck
- Struck circa April-late AD 68
- Authority
- Galba
- Reverse
- S P Q R OB C S in three lines within an oak wreath