69 AD: The Year of Four Emperors

by Gwyn Morgan

  At some point after this Galba retired into private life. As our sources offer no explanation, it is usually assumed that one reason for this was Claudius’ deciding in 49 to marry his niece, the Younger Agrippina. The sister of Caligula and the mother of Nero, she took more delight in carrying grudges than did most Romans of her day, male or female, and she nursed one against Galba. She had made a dead set at him while he was married. Not only had he rejected her. His mother-in-law had also slapped Agrippina’s face publicly, a major scandal since aristocratic women were even less prone to physical violence than their menfolk. Galba gave up living in Rome and, says Suetonius, “whenever he went out for exercise in his carriage” (sic), he took care to be accompanied by a second carriage loaded with a million sesterces in gold. Whether he envisaged using the money to buy off potential assassins, or to purchase a refuge beyond their reach, he clearly fancied that his life was at risk.

  From this well-insulated obscurity Galba emerged in 59 or 60, when Nero sent him to govern Spain (Hispania Tarraconensis). Plutarch sees the appointment as a tribute to Galba, observing that Nero had not yet learnt to fear citizens of high renown, but high renown was what Galba had been shunning for a decade. Besides, Nero and his advisers probably expected little from a man in his sixties (even Plutarch allows that Nero thought Galba’s age would render him cautious). It would be better to link his reemergence with Nero’s murder of Agrippina in 59. Since others who had fallen foul of her also reentered public life then, Vespasian amongst them, Galba’s appointment suggests that the court began recruiting personnel who were neither friends of the emperor’s late mother nor troubled by her demise (she had remained a formidable personality to the end). Not that Galba recognized this. At first he imagined that energetic administration would win him plaudits in Rome. When he found the reverse to be true, he let inertia take over. As Tacitus says, to defend his own father-in-law Agricola, “in Nero’s times inertia passed for wisdom.” But advancing years also played their part. Suetonius reports that Galba’s hands and feet were crippled by arthritis, and Galba spent eight years in Spain. So what started as a plan hardened into habit.

  In person Galba was nearly six feet tall, with blue eyes, an aquiline nose and a jutting chin. His coins depict a man with a full head of hair, probably because baldness was another defect to ridicule and Galba was almost completely bald. But if he looked like an emperor in most respects, his character traits undercut the image. Grim and humorless, he made a fetish of being old-fashioned even in his youth, and he not only clung to such behavior patterns, but carried them into his public life too. The Romans, for example, had always considered frugality a virtue—unless it was carried to extremes, and even Plutarch concedes that Galba went too far. Such behavior was not entirely irrational. Rich as Galba was, nobody accused him of gaining his fortune by illegal or immoral means. And whatever he thought of his elder brother’s behavior, Galba was swindled out of 50 million sesterces by Tiberius. According to Suetonius, this enormous sum had been left to him by Livia Drusilla, Augustus’ widow, when she died in 29. Tiberius, as her son the executor of the will, first chopped the figure down to 50,000 sesterces and then neglected to hand over the money. Dio, it is true, asserts that when Caligula succeeded Tiberius in 37, one way in which he marked himself off from his predecessor was to pay the bequests Tiberius had not honored, among them those made by Livia. So Galba should have received his money eight years later, and that may help explain his readiness to work with an emperor who, by the summer of 39, was behaving somewhat erratically. Yet this windfall could not undo a marked tendency to penny-pinching. Though emperors were expected to be generous with money as a matter of course, Galba—to quote Tacitus’ backhanded compliment— “coveted nobody else’s, was sparing of his own, and was miserly with the state’s.”

  This refusal to part with cash was to hurt Galba most in his dealings with the soldiery, but he could hardly have acted differently in the face of their demands, when he was also such a martinet. In saying that “he selected his soldiers, he did not buy them,” Galba evinced a harshness as well as a parsimony deeply ingrained in his nature. He expected rankers and officers alike to do neither more nor less than they were told, and he considered disobedience and discontent unacceptable challenges to his authority—and not only when they came from the military. The biggest problem, however, was the isolation created by the combination of Galba’s behavior patterns with his age and position. To have survived the reigns of five emperors unscathed was a feat almost none of his peers had matched. In effect, he was the last member of his generation, one reason probably why he idolized Lutatius Catulus. Even had he not undergone ten years in retirement from public life, and another eight in semi-exile in Spain, he would have found it difficult to relate to the men who had risen to the top in Nero’s reign. And since, in his estimation, these men could have advanced their careers only by truckling to the emperor, he had no more reason to respect or trust them than they had to admire or support him. As a result, he put his faith only in three immediate associates, Titus Vinius, Cornelius Laco, and Icelus. Derisively nicknamed his “pedagogues,” since they never left his side, these three feuded among themselves constantly, but they were united in their determination to ensure that nobody else gained a hold over their master. And that set the seal on Galba’s isolation, since he turned a blind eye to the faults all three possessed in abundance.

  Vinius was the most influential member of this cabal, predictably, when he was a senator and in 68, despite a career beset with scandals, commander of the legion stationed in Tarraconensis, VI Victrix. He was also the most energetic of the three, although he exerted himself above all to amass a huge personal fortune and, well aware of his master’s age, did so as if there were no tomorrow. Laco, a knight, held the lowly post of Galba’s legal adviser, until the emperor took it into his head to make him prefect of the praetorian guard. To this post Laco brought no military and little administrative experience, but unlike Vinius, he appears to have been honest. His principal vices, as the sources put it, were intolerable arrogance and unbelievable laziness. As for Icelus, Galba’s minion as well as his freedman, he was promoted to equestrian status when he brought the news of Nero’s suicide from Rome to Spain in a mere seven days. He would spend the rest of his short life, like Vinius, trying rapidly to accumulate the fortune appropriate to his new status. According to Suetonius, he also intrigued to secure appointment as prefect of the praetorian guard with Laco, one more reason perhaps why he tended to side with Laco against Vinius whenever the pedagogues fell out among themselves.

  So tight was the circle the “pedagogues” drew around Galba that not even the two men who did most to help him while he was readying his revolt in Spain were able to break through. The younger of the two, Aulus Caecina Alienus, may not have been interested at this stage, since he had a career to make. As quaestor of the senatorial province of Baetica in 68 his job was to control the public monies of the province. These, or—more accurately—much of these, he turned over to Galba, as soon as the latter appealed for help. His reward was promotion to the command of a legion stationed in Upper Germany, probably IV Macedonica at Mogontiacum (Mainz), and with this he ought to have been well pleased. It was a position he would not normally have reached for another five to eight years. Before the end of 68, however, Galba was informed that Caecina had diverted funds into his own pocket, and ordered that the young man be brought to trial for embezzlement. His principles were to cost him dearly. Rather than submit, Caecina would use his forceful personality to make himself one of the leaders in Vitellius’ revolt.

  The other, far more important person was Marcus Salvius Otho, governor of Lusitania (Portugal). Born on 28 April 32, Otho was determinedly untypical, as a senator and as a governor. The family came from Ferentium in Etruria, a town about 40 miles north of Rome. Otho’s grandfather was the first to acquire senatorial rank, but his father Lucius was far more successful. A close friend of Tiberius, he became consul in 33, and desp
ite a falling out with Claudius in 41/42, the latter raised him to the patriciate in 47/48 for his conspicuous and unshakeable loyalty. By his wife, Albia Terentia, Lucius had three children, a daughter of whom almost nothing is known, and two sons. The elder, Lucius Salvius Titianus, followed dutifully, if uninspiringly, in his father’s footsteps. He became consul in 52 and governor of Asia (western Turkey), probably in 63/64, a post in which he distinguished himself mainly by his avarice, or so Tacitus asserts in the biography of his own father-in-law Agricola, Titianus’ quaestor at the time. Otho, the younger son, took a different route. Gaining entrée to the court in his early twenties, he became Nero’s boon companion, rivaling him in wildness and surpassing him in extravagance. But they fell out over Poppaea. The dynamics of this triangle remain controversial, but according to the story told by Plutarch, Suetonius, and Tacitus’ Histories, Nero coveted the woman, and persuaded Otho to marry her as a stopgap while he himself disposed of his wife Octavia; Otho had the audacity to fall in love with Poppaea; and when Nero failed to persuade Otho to honor the terms of their agreement, he got his own way only by inducing Poppaea to repudiate her husband. Not that she seems to have needed much urging. Nero then removed Otho from the scene in 58 by sending him to govern Lusitania. In one way this counted as a promotion: Otho had held only the quaestorship, and Lusitania was normally governed by ex-praetors. In another, it amounted to exile, since Nero had no intention of recalling Otho to Rome, ever.

  To everybody’s surprise Otho proved a good and responsible governor. But since he had made his name at court as a young man about town, he was probably desperate to return to Rome and civilization long before 68. When Galba accepted Vindex’s invitation to head the revolt against Nero, therefore, Otho was the first to support him. He handed over all the gold and silver on which he could lay his hands, giving Galba the specie he needed to coin the money with which to pay his troops. With firm ideas about fashion and taste, Otho also presented Galba with those of his own slaves he thought qualified to wait on an emperor’s table. Neither gift inspired gratitude in their recipient. The slaves could be regarded as needless refinements at this stage in the proceedings, as potential spies for Otho, and as an indication that Otho thought Galba’s lifestyle less modest and sparing than tasteless and uncouth. The specie Galba no doubt took simply as his due.

  To explain Otho’s behavior, Suetonius talks of a wish for revenge on Nero, and this was probably his original motivation. Romans believed in repaying bad turns as well as good, with interest too. But there was another factor at work. Otho had picked up a taste for astrology, seemingly from Poppaea, and one practitioner of the art, Ptolemy, had accompanied him to Spain. To ease Otho’s fears that he would be spending the rest of his life in the backwoods of Lusitania, Ptolemy had predicted that he would outlive Nero. Once this came to pass, Otho was ready to take as fact anything else Ptolemy had to say, and Ptolemy announced now that Otho would become emperor “soon.” Buoyed up by this prediction, Otho decided that the easiest way to achieve this objective would be to secure his adoption by the childless Galba. This would subordinate him legally to Galba, but the price was worth the prize, and nobody thought Galba long for this world. But in following this course Otho manifested a talent for self-deception no smaller than Galba’s. As Tacitus remarks later, Galba had not rescued the empire from a Nero to entrust it to an Otho. So even as the latter did all he could to make himself indispensable to Galba, he set himself up for disillusionment great enough—in his own mind—to justify violent retaliation when his hopes were crushed.

  Since Galba had to secure Spain before he left, he took nearly a month to quit the peninsula, but we have few details. Suetonius offers a generalized picture, applicable to Gaul as well as Spain: according to him Galba raised the tribute to be paid by towns that had hesitated to join him, and lowered the figure for the towns that had declared for him. He adds that Galba put to death governors and procurators who equivocated, and their wives and children too. This last detail Galba’s apologists have tried to explain away, but stray hints tend to confirm its veracity. When even vicious emperors found it expedient not to molest the wives and children of their victims, Galba’s action justified the reputation for savagery he acquired. For the rest, nobody disputes that he executed Obultronius Sabinus, probably the governor of Baetica whom Caecina had sidestepped, and Lucius Cornelius Marcellus, another senatorial functionary in Spain. As it turned out, killing two senators was killing two more than the senate thought right and proper, and these two only led off the list of illustrious casualties. Heads would continue to roll, as in Nero’s later years, with little semblance of due process.

  In middle or late July Galba completed his preparations. After installing the ineffectual Cluvius Rufus as his replacement in Tarraconensis, he set out for Gaul, escorted by his newly recruited legion, VII Galbiana, and wearing a general’s cloak and a large sword at his side. The sword was meant, it seems, to proclaim his determination to deal harshly with all opposition, and to bolster claims that his every exercise of summary judgment was justified by military emergency. But initially, says Dio, it provoked “a good deal of laughter.” Neither by age nor by physical condition was Galba suited to play the energetic military leader he may once have been. Though we cannot reconstruct his itinerary, he must have made his way first to Narbo Martius (Narbonne) on the southern coast. Here, early in August, he was met by an embassy from the senate that begged him to hurry on to Rome, since all awaited his arrival eagerly. This was probably conventional courtesy. Tacitus stresses the senators’ delight in being able to discuss any subject they liked without an emperor presiding over the session and inhibiting debate. Then too, the senate had sent a similar message to Caligula in 40, when they were in such bad odor with him that he allegedly contemplated slaughtering them all.

  Yet there is another possibility, that the envoys were attempting tactfully to indicate concern about the conduct of Nymphidius Sabinus, the prefect of the praetorian guard. Plutarch, our primary source on this, gives a detailed account of Nymphidius’ fall, but nothing he says correlates the prefect’s activities with Galba’s. It is impossible to say what contacts Nymphidius had made with Galba’s supporters in Rome before Nero’s suicide. And Icelus—whoever released him from confinement—left the city immediately after the emperor’s death, to carry the news to his master. Perhaps Galba imagined that Tigellinus would keep his colleague under control, not only as the senior prefect, but also because he had hedged his bets in Nero’s last days by saving the life of Vinius’ daughter. But Tigellinus had withdrawn from public life, and that allowed Nymphidius to seize sole control. Emboldened when magistrates and senators rushed to dance attendance on him, Nymphidius gratified those who wanted reprisals by letting them kill any of Nero’s ministers they could find. And he redoubled his own efforts to win friends among the leading men and women in Rome.

  According to Plutarch, Nymphidius’ ambitions grew apace. But he received no word from Galba, even when he sent furnishings from the palace to Narbo Martius. Galba did not appreciate this finery, at first anyway. Why Galba did not respond is another question. He may have planned to give Nymphidius enough rope to hang himself. Or he may have wanted to avoid alienating a convenient helper by divulging that he meant to install Laco as prefect of the guard. Leaving somebody unreliable in control of Rome was better than having nobody at all in charge. Or Galba may have thought the situation in Rome the least of his worries. He certainly seems not to have envisaged the possibility that a prefect would engage in kingmaking on his own account. Nymphidius tried to clarify the situation by sending one of his friends, Gellianus, to act “as a kind of spy on Galba,” but from him he was to learn only that the emperor was impervious to his charms. Gellianus had been kept away from Galba by Vinius, while Laco had been appointed prefect. Overwhelmed by the injustice of it all, Nymphidius summoned the officers of the guard, informed them that he had no objection to Galba, a well-meaning old man, but stressed his concern that the
emperor was putty in the hands of Vinius and Laco. They should send a collective letter, he suggested, urging Galba to give up his friendship with two men who bid fair to exert the kind of baneful influence on him that Tigellinus had on Nero. Whatever the officers thought, they replied that it was not for them to dictate to a man of Galba’s years, as they would to a youth, who should or should not be his friends.

  Forced to use different tactics, Nymphidius tried to provoke a response by sending Galba a string of alarmist messages: there was unrest in the city; the legionary legate of III Augusta, Clodius Macer, had seized control of Africa and was withholding grain supplies from Rome; the legions in Germany were still mutinous; and bad news was coming in from Syria and Judaea.4 So far as we can tell, this was supposed to induce the emperor to speed up his march to Italy, and so expose himself to the prefect’s personal influence. But Galba disregarded these tidings of woe. Perhaps he did not believe the reports. Perhaps he did but, being disenchanted with Nymphidius, imagined that the troubles would add more to the prefect’s unpopularity than to his own. So Nymphidius decided that since he could not control the emperor, he might as well become the emperor.