Sestertius - Galba and Livia AVGVSTA S C

Galba's brief reign — June 68 to January 69 AD, cut short by assassination on the Palatine Hill — produced a remarkably active propaganda program in bronze, much of it invoking deified or idealized women of the Julio-Claudian house to legitimize a new dynasty that never materialized. Livia, dead for nearly four decades by the time this coin was struck, was a calculated choice: associating the elderly Spanish general with Augustus's widow borrowed Julio-Claudian prestige without any living claimant to dispute it.

RIC I 331 is among the more frequently encountered of Galba's sestertius types, though the reign's seven-month span keeps absolute numbers modest.