by Gwyn Morgan
This interpretation may seem far-fetched because, by mid-68, there can have been few, if any, rankers or junior officers still in service who had experienced Galba’s severity. But any such objection assumes that neither the Rhine legions nor Rome’s armed forces in general possessed a corporate or collective memory. A story in Suetonius undermines the supposition. Originally, so he declares, Otho planned to murder Galba on the evening of 10 January 69, “but he was checked by consideration for the praetorian cohort on duty at the palace at the time, not wanting it to be burdened with still more infamy. For that same cohort had been on duty when Caligula was assassinated and, again, when the guard deserted Nero.” This is not all. As Otho himself was hardly the type of person we would expect to have a detailed knowledge of such matters, before or after he decided to murder Galba, it is worth wondering how he developed this consideration for the troops, legionary or praetorian. An answer can be found in another story Suetonius tells, this time about Otho’s father. He had been made governor of Dalmatia by Claudius in 42, immediately after Camillus Scribonianus’ revolt. There he had publicly executed some soldiers who had attempted to make up for their own momentary defection by killing their officers, alleging plausibly that the latter had led them astray. Since Otho’s father had done this, though he knew that the men had been rewarded with promotion by Claudius, his foolhardiness cost him the emperor’s favor for a while. Suetonius does not report the troops’ reaction, but it is by no means fanciful to conclude that they were angrier still. Against this background, we can see Otho’s consideration for his supporters as the result of a wish not to repeat his father’s mistake and add another error of judgment to the troops’ collective memory.
There is a more serious objection to this explanation, however. So far as we can tell, the four legions in Upper Germany that had been subjected to Galba’s severity between 39 and 41 were XIII Gemina, XIV Gemina Martia Victrix, XVI, and XXII Primigenia. Of these only one was still in the district in 68/69, XXII Primigenia. But another, XVI, was practically next door, in Lower Germany, and that adds another dimension to Tacitus’ comment about the folly of bringing together legions from different areas. If one unit complained loudly about Galba’s shortcomings, it might be ignored. If two different units from two different areas complained, their claims tended to confirm one another. Besides, while XIII Gemina was miles away in Pannonia now, XIV Gemina Martia Victrix was stationed in northern Italy, and though Tacitus never explains why, XIV Gemina Martia Victrix was of all four legions the most loyal to Nero, up to the moment of his suicide.6 And this is before we add that many veterans from the Rhine legions settled near their old camps, to be with their friends. It would be unwise to assume that old age diminished their long-term memory.
Whatever the case, Galba possessed the trappings of an emperor by the time Vesontio was fought, even if he persisted in terming himself the lieutenant of the senate and people of Rome. He still lacked significant military support, however, and he was shattered by the news, not of Vindex’s defeat, but of Verginius’ being proclaimed emperor by the Rhine legions. He wrote to Verginius immediately, inviting him “to work with him to preserve both the empire and the liberty of the Romans,” but Verginius ignored or rejected these overtures. So, says Plutarch, Galba withdrew in despair to Clunia, a small town in the inmost recesses of his province, and was persuaded only with difficulty not to take his life. In Rome, conversely, people may have been disquieted by the conduct of the Rhine legions, especially as Verginius made no attempt after the battle to return them to their billets. Instead he and his forces lay encamped somewhere in Gaul, perhaps at Vesontio, but more probably in the neighborhood of Lugdunum. This was just the kind of situation to encourage gossips to theorize that he was planning, not to pursue Galba, but to turn on Nero. In all likelihood, Verginius was intent only on pacifying Gaul, and there was no reason to despair. Besides, Nero had bestirred himself at last.
Nero had treated the news of Vindex’s revolt with indifference, still flushed with the success of his pilgrimage to Greece, home of all the arts. During his tour every single Greek city had obligingly staged its every festival and had ensured, just as obligingly, that the emperor won first prize in any athletic or artistic contest he entered. According to Dio, he won a grand total of 1,808 victories and besides this Vindex’s revolt was small beer. To the news that Galba had accepted leadership of the movement, however, Nero responded vigorously. He recalled forces earmarked for the eastern campaigns he was contemplating; he mobilized units waiting in Italy to take part in those campaigns (XIV Gemina Martia Victrix among them). He probably attempted to bring troops across from Africa. He set about forming a legion from marines of the imperial fleet stationed at Misenum in the Bay of Naples. And in Rome he called for volunteers from the citizenry. Unlike Vitellius a year later, he was unable to mobilize the citizens, but he extorted huge sums of money from the wealthy with which to pay the forces he did raise. The bulk of them were placed in the Cisalpina (Italy north of the Apennines) under a known loyalist, Publius Petronius Turpilianus, and the rest were assigned to another commander, Rubrius Gallus.
Although Suetonius gives the fullest account of Nero’s last days, he no more than hints at this. Instead he expatiates on a series of bizarre plans Nero allegedly contemplated (to poison the entire senate at banquets, for example, or to turn loose on the citizenry the wild beasts being held in Rome for the games). He also dwells on the comic-opera aspects of the emperor’s more realistic preparations, among them his procuring wagons to carry his theatrical equipment and his fitting out his concubines with Amazonian axes and shields. This is scandal mongering, but Suetonius for once is on the right track. Nero’s grip on reality was little stronger now than it had ever been. In the 30-odd days left to him he swung from overconfidence to a total failure of nerve. What caused this it is impossible to say. But since Tacitus attributes his overthrow more to messages and rumors than to force of arms, it looks as if the emperor was unnerved by news, false as it turned out, that he had been deserted by all his commanders. One key figure, Rubrius Gallus, certainly went over to the rebels, and Petronius Turpilianus appears to have been deserted by his troops or, more probably, to have been unable to lead them against the enemy. Although one of the legions under his command was XIV Gemina Martia Victrix, it was stalemated by the eight cohorts of Batavian auxiliaries attached to it. Yet Verginius Rufus still held firm to Nero, and he could have disposed of all the dissidents easily. But perhaps his motives, not to mention his ability to resist temptation, looked questionable in Rome. What is certain is that by the end of May Nero was contemplating flight. He was unsure of his destination, but his first choice was Alexandria in Egypt.
At this point a new player took a hand, Nymphidius Sabinus. Of his earlier career we know only that he had been prefect of an auxiliary unit in Claudius’ reign and in 65 had been appointed Tigellinus’ colleague as prefect of the praetorian guard. By June 68, however, he was effectively the only prefect. Once again the evidence fails to explain how this came about. Perhaps Tigellinus lost his nerve as badly as did the emperor whose creature he was. He was certainly not committed wholly to Nero’s cause. Tacitus reports that Tigellinus saved the life of Titus Vinius’ daughter, probably during the roundup that ensnared Icelus, and that he did so to protect his own position in the future. Perhaps too Tigellinus was seriously ill; he was certainly so by January 69. Whatever it was that disabled Tigellinus, Nymphidius seized the opportunity to put Galba in his debt by bringing the praetorian guard over to his side. In return, he seems to have thought, Galba would make him sole prefect of the guard for years to come and so sole arbiter of Rome. For Plutarch has Nymphidius imagining that if the aging Galba survived the long and arduous trek from Spain, Nymphidius would be able to lead his new master around by the nose.
Plutarch makes Nymphidius the villain who first demonstrated to the brutal Soldateska the power they could exercise over events. Not only is this incorrect chronologically, in that Plutar
ch sets Verginius’ being hailed emperor by his unruly troops earlier. It is misleading too, since subverting the guard proved far from easy. Nymphidius made his move on the night of 8/9 June. He was able to loosen the bond of the praetorians’ oath of loyalty, to a large extent, by alleging that they were not deserting their emperor. He had deserted them and embarked on a ship bound for Alexandria. The allegation was premature. Suetonius reports that Nero had just sounded out tribunes and centurions of the guard about accompanying him to Egypt. Even so, the prefect had to promise the men, in Galba’s name, a donative of 7,500 denarii (30,000 sesterces) apiece, a gigantic sum, ten times their annual pay and twice the amount Claudius and Nero had each distributed when they became emperor.7 Insofar as this proved a conclusive argument, it may have done so largely because neither the prefect nor the men considered how so vast an amount was going to be raised—unless they imagined that Galba would find it out of his own pocket. This goes well with Plutarch’s statement that Galba was the richest private citizen ever to enter the house of the Caesars. Once the guard had been persuaded to abandon Nero, the senate plucked up the courage to declare him an enemy of the state and formally to proclaim Galba their new ruler.
Nero fled to the country villa of his freedman Phaon some four miles from Rome and, after much hesitation, steeled himself to commit suicide by driving a dagger into his throat. It was a singularly inartistic end for the last male member of the Julio-Claudian line. When the Rhine legions heard the news, not just of Nero’s suicide but of Galba’s recognition by the senate, they made one more attempt to put Verginius on the throne, and this time we are told explicitly that an officer threatened him with a drawn sword if he declined the offer. Yet decline it he did. Since the senate had ratified Galba, and since Verginius had asserted all along that it was for the senate and people to choose an emperor, he could hardly reverse himself. And so, after the lead had been given to them by Fabius Valens, legionary legate of I Germanica, the troops accepted Galba, and even Plutarch concedes that this was carried through “only with difficulty.”
Tacitus sums up Galba’s reign in his epigram that everybody agreed that Galba would make an excellent emperor, until he became emperor. Like most good epigrams, it is an overstatement and a misstatement. Suetonius puts it more awkwardly but more accurately, when he states that Galba enjoyed greater popularity and respect when winning the empire than he did when running it. But even this does not capture the essence of the situation in the second week of June 68. Apart from the fact that not everybody could be brought to agree on Galba at first, it was by default, almost by a chapter of accidents, that he became emperor. Yet this may explain why he succeeded where previous attempts to displace the Julio-Claudians had failed. Had Vindex’s uprising not looked like a Gallic revolt, the legions would not have been drawn from both Germanies to crush the insurgents, nor would Vindex have appealed to Galba. Similarly, had Galba not assumed the leadership of the uprising, the legions from the Rhine frontier would likely not have tried to make Verginius emperor. And had there been less uncertainty about the motives and prospects of Galba and Verginius alike, Nero might still have panicked, but Nymphidius would have been much less tempted to take the action that completed the ruin of the imperial house.
2
The Reign of Galba (June 68 to January 69)
The moment Galba was recognized as emperor, people began dusting off stories to prove that he had long been destined for the principate. Suetonius has several examples, among them claims—liberally sprinkled with circumstantial detail—that Augustus and Tiberius had each foreseen this outcome. The reality was more prosaic, but Servius Sulpicius Galba was justly proud of his ancestry. The Sulpicii, a patrician clan, had held office in Rome since the early republic, and as Suetonius observes, to give a detailed account would be a long and tedious business. The branch that bore the surname Galba came to the fore during the Hannibalic War, and was the dominant line thereafter. Its members were some of them heroes and some of them scoundrels, some of them gifted and some of them mediocrities—like Galba’s father, Gaius. He reached the consulship in 5 B.C., but spent most of his life as an industrious but ineffective advocate. What people remembered was his being a hunchback. This fascinated his second wife, Livia Ocellina, more rather than less “after he responded to her repeated advances by taking off his robe in private and revealing his physical disfigurement to her.” It also elicited jokes from Augustus and other prominent men. Having developed an aesthetic that regarded physical defects as fit subjects for ridicule, Romans readily made fun of the handicapped. This indeed is why Suetonius reports that Livia Ocellina was beautiful as well as rich, leaving his readers to draw the appropriate conclusions about what an ill-assorted couple the marriage produced.1
Over the years dynastic marriages must have produced links between the Sulpicii Galbae and other leading families, but the value of these alliances faded as each generation passed. Galba himself prized only two. First, through his mother Mummia Achaica, there was the relationship with Quintus Lutatius Catulus, the consul of 78 B.C. and grand old man among the politicians of the late republic. Galba apparently saw him as a role model, especially in his own old age. The second was his relationship with his stepmother, Livia Ocellina. In her will she adopted Galba as her own child, leaving him considerable wealth so long as he took her name. From then on he styled himself officially Lucius Livius Ocella Sulpicius Galba. Unofficially, he probably kept his original name, just as Marcus Brutus the tyrannicide became Quintus Servilius Caepio Brutus by adoption, but was rarely so called in nonofficial contexts. When Galba became emperor, he reverted officially to his original name. By reminding people that he belonged to a family glorious in the republic, it seems, he imagined that he could render his elevation more acceptable, and create the impression (it was never more than an impression) that he would respect the rule of law as his Julio-Claudian predecessors had not.
As emperor, according to Suetonius, Galba displayed in the atrium of the palace a family tree that traced his ancestry back to Jupiter on his father’s side and on his mother’s to Pasiphae, the mythological wife of the equally mythological King Minos of Crete. It would be easy to see this as part of a plan to credit him with origins as illustrious as those of the dynasty he supplanted. But Caesar had claimed descent from Venus long before there were emperors, and such claims were all the rage among the aristocrats of his day.2 So it is much likelier that one of Galba’s ancestors grafted this genealogical fantasy onto the family tree, and that the matter came to public notice in Galba’s reign, because that was when the family tree was first displayed for all to see. But no matter how we explain it, the detail is significant, because Galba was obsessed with bloodlines, his own and those of others, ultimately to the point where it cost him his life.
Galba was born on 24 December, in either 3 or 5 B.C. (The sources contradict themselves as well as each other.) He had one elder brother, Gaius, ten or more years his senior, but Gaius proved to be a “bad lot.” Although he reached the consulship for 22, he squandered his estate, withdrew from Rome, and, after falling from favor with Tiberius, committed suicide in 36. Galba himself married around 20 A.D., taking as his wife Aemilia Lepida, a patrician lady with an ancestry even more illustrious than his own, and by her he had two children (we are not told whether they were boys or girls). Since he lost them and their mother in the early years of Claudius’ reign, apparently to illness, it may seem odd that he never remarried, though he lived for another 30 years. But Suetonius describes the union in terms suggesting that it was hardly more than a formality. And if Galba’s obsession with ancestry was matched by a concern for descendants, he may have decided that when the need arose, adoption would provide him with more satisfactory offspring and conserve his own energy in the meantime.
Galba’s entire early career fell within the reign of Tiberius (14–37), and it was not distinguished. He worked his way through the assortment of offices a senator was supposed to hold, at more or less the ages he
was supposed to hold them, and the process culminated in the consulship for 33.3 Another six years had to pass before he got a chance to make his mark. In the summer of 39 Caligula uncovered a conspiracy against him in which one leading figure was Gnaeus Lentulus Gaetulicus, the popular but lazy commander of the legions in Upper Germany, the military district closer to Rome. Disposing of the plotters, the emperor installed Galba in Gaetulicus’ place, and Galba lost no time in displaying qualities that endeared him greatly to his master, though not at all to the troops. Less a disciplinarian than a martinet, he reintroduced the men—veterans as much as raw recruits—to constant exertion, and in military maneuvers showed that he was as tough as he wanted them to be by running for 20 miles behind the emperor’s chariot. This may be an impressive tribute to the physical endurance of a man in his early forties, but it also illustrates that Roman generals could be valued for their physical prowess more than their mental capacities, and not only under a Caligula.
Galba was still the governor of Upper Germany when Caligula was murdered in January 41. Suetonius asserts that “many now urged him to seize his chance,” that is, to bid for the throne, but he rejected their advice. The tale cannot be taken seriously. Claudius’ accession followed so closely on his nephew’s assassination that news of both events should have reached Germany almost simultaneously. It may even be fiction, intended to foreshadow Galba’s later elevation and to explain the favor he enjoyed under the new emperor. In 43 Claudius made a whirlwind, 16-day tour of his latest acquisition, Britain. Yet, according to Suetonius, he was so set on Galba’s accompanying him that he delayed his own departure until the latter had recovered from a sudden illness. The emperor showed the same trust in Galba when he intervened in the allocation of senatorial provinces in 44 or 45, insisting that Galba be made governor of Africa (coterminous more or less with modern Tunisia) for a two-year term. His assigned task was to restore order within the province and on its frontiers. As Suetonius’ report is limited to anecdotes, it is certain only that Galba campaigned successfully against nomads raiding across the southern frontier. For this he was given “triumphal ornaments,” the substitute in imperial times for a triumph, or victory procession, through the streets of Rome that had been awarded to generals under the republic.