Plutarch, a Greek from Chaeronea in what is now central Greece, wrote Parallel Lives: biographies of famous Greeks and Romans set side by side as studies of character. This life is Galba. It is not a pair on this page. The scene is Spain and the city of Rome in the year 69, just after Nero.

Servius Sulpicius Galba was old and frugal, and people thought he would be the cure for Nero. The armies in Spain proclaimed him emperor. Nero died. The Senate, Rome’s council of leading men, cheered a stern Republican — a man who still talked as if the city should be run by a senate and elected officials, not a king. He was already too slow for that year. He would not pay the Guard, the emperor’s household troops, the cash bonus they had been promised. Otho bought them instead. Galba was cut down in the Forum, the public square at Rome’s heart, and his head was taken to a soldier who had no use for it. He was the first of four emperors in a single year.