by Gwyn Morgan
This was a suicidal move. Nymphidius held the highest position to which a knight could aspire, but for all his power he was still a knight, and no knight would become emperor for another century and a half. If this helps explain why Galba may have underestimated Nymphidius, however, it does not account for the prefect’s behavior. We cannot accuse him simply of folie de grandeur. He seems to have realized that while knights could seek promotion into the senatorial order, they did this customarily at the start of their careers, not at their peak. So, apparently to surmount this hurdle, he fabricated an imperial ancestry for himself and claimed to be a son of Caligula. Actually, says Plutarch, the prefect’s mother had had an affair with the emperor, but after Nymphidius was born. He was thought to be the child of a gladiator named Marcianus. Possibly Nymphidius imagined that the end of the Julio-Claudian dynasty marked so vast a dislocation that new rules could be invented for the game of politics. His more sycophantic senatorial associates certainly encouraged him to bid for the throne. And though one friend warned him that neither dissatisfaction with Galba nor Nymphidius’ record could justify such a step, the rest kept silent. As for the praetorian guard, Nymphidius fancied that he could rely on their loyalty, and so decided to enter the camp after midnight and stage-manage his own proclamation as the new ruler of the Roman world.
Unfortunately for him, one of the military tribunes, Antonius Honoratus, showed unexpected initiative. Assembling the cohort under his command, he pointed out the shamefulness of their changing allegiance once again, especially as they could not charge Galba with the crimes they had used to justify deserting Nero. To kill Nymphidius, he continued, would avenge the death of Nero (clear proof that the guard was not as venal as is sometimes imagined), and it would confirm their loyalty to Galba. This convinced the men under his command and they scattered to win over their comrades. The resulting uproar, says Plutarch, convinced Nymphidius either that the soldiers were ready to proclaim him emperor, or else that he must intervene before those opposed to his elevation gained the upper hand. So, accompanied by a crowd of hangers-on, he made his appearance at the gate, carrying in his hand the script of the speech he meant to deliver.5 At first, he was refused entry. When he demanded to know who had given the order, the men shouted that they were true to Galba. Responding that so too was he, Nymphidius was admitted with a few followers. Once he was inside the gates, however, they were shut behind him and somebody hurled a spear. Although it missed its mark, it spurred the men to draw their swords and close in. Nymphidius fled further into the camp, hotly pursued by the guardsmen, and was cut down. His corpse was dragged out, surrounded with a paling, and exposed to public view for a full day.
Whether or not the senate’s anxieties about Nymphidius prompted their envoys to request that Galba hasten to Rome, he had no intention of complying. Plutarch reports that Galba impressed the envoys with his kindness and modesty. He invited them to dinner, something members of the senate always appreciated as a sign of an emperor’s approachability (comitas), no matter how bad the meal. And since he ignored the furniture Nymphidius had sent from the palace, he gave them the idea that he was a man of exalted spirit, averse to vulgar luxury. Such conduct, Plutarch adds, he would abandon under Vinius’ tutelage. Nonetheless, he turned north into Gaul, traveling perhaps as far as Lugdunum. There he seems to have installed as governor of the province Junius Blaesus, an aristocrat known for his breeding and his loyalty. Galba must also have been responsible for stationing legion I Italica in the town, along with its associated cavalry squadron, the ala Tauriana. Though this legion had been raised by Nero late in 66, and had been quartered in northern Italy, as part of the force assembled to oppose Vindex, Galba apparently took it for granted that the troops were loyal to him, or—at the least—that the new governor would not use them against him. So the unit could perform useful service holding down the city that had been the first stumbling block to his erstwhile associate. Besides, Lugdunum housed an imperial mint, and Galba mobilized its workshops to add to the flood of his own coinage.
Elsewhere in the area, with less wisdom as it turned out, Galba began to settle accounts with other friends and enemies. He rewarded the Aedui, Arverni, and Sequani, the tribes that had supported Vindex, with additional territory and remission of tribute. And he punished correspondingly the two tribes that had cooperated closely with the Rhine legions, the Treveri and the Lingones. But the legions, especially those of Upper Germany, he appears to have left well alone. He may have recognized that visiting the troops would only upset them, but his later conduct suggests that he failed to appreciate how deeply the Rhine legions hated him and, taking their allegiance for granted, moved on to the next item of business. This left the legions with no reason to be thankful. They were probably relieved that he neglected to punish them for having crushed Vindex, but they never shook off their fear that there would be drastic reprisals one day. And they must have persuaded themselves that such punishment would be unjust. They had suppressed what they saw as a provincial rebellion, and they should have received rewards, decorations, promotions, even new postings. Galba’s failure to reward them merely increased their animosity.
In Gaul, Galba is said to have put to death only one man of note, Betuus Cilo, the governor of Aquitania who had had the temerity in 68 to request auxiliary troops from Galba when Vindex’s rising first broke out. But there were to be two more casualties. The first was Verginius Rufus. Galba could not execute a commander who, like himself, had stated publicly that only the senate and people of Rome could choose an emperor. But apart from Verginius’ having given Galba a bad fright when the two of them were feeling each other out after Vesontio, he had been hailed emperor by his troops. Since it was obvious folly to leave Verginius in command of men who had believed him worthy of supreme power, Galba replaced him with somebody safe, Hordeonius Flaccus. Tacitus describes Flaccus as old and disabled by gout, irresolute, unimpressive, and so incompetent that he could not control the soldiery when they were quiet, let alone restrain them when they mutinied. Verginius waited for Flaccus, handed over the command without demur, and set off to join his emperor. Whatever reception he expected, he was treated with studied indifference. Perhaps leaving Verginius in suspense was Galba’s way of repaying him for the uncertainty he himself had suffered in Clunia.
The second casualty was Fonteius Capito, commander of the legions in Lower Germany. The circumstances are obscure. Tacitus reports that he was killed by two legionary legates, Cornelius Aquinus and Fabius Valens, and that they acted without orders around the time when Galba was nearing Rome. Some people, he continues, believed that while Capito had led a thoroughly disgraceful life, he had never contemplated revolt. So he was killed by the two legates for rejecting their proposal to mount a conspiracy against Galba and, once dead, was accused of the crime of which his subordinates were guilty. This may be true. Fabius Valens had persuaded the troops to swear the oath of allegiance to Galba, a success achieved “only with difficulty,” and he must have been incensed when he was not rewarded. He seems not to have appreciated that Galba let the matter go. Whether Galba feared what an inquiry would unearth, or decided that an investigation would change nothing, he countenanced the murder, and by so doing accepted responsibility for it.
The names of four more prominent men were added to the list of the dead before Galba reached Rome, and another one after his arrival. Strictly, Galba did not order the execution of Nymphidius Sabinus. But after he heard of the latter’s fate, he gave instructions that those of Nymphidius’ associates who were still alive should be put to death. This took care of two men, Cingonius Varro, one of the consuls designate for 69 and author of the speech Nymphidius had meant to give to the guard, and Mithridates of Pontus, once the client-king of the Bosporus but a resident in Rome since 48, and at this stage given to joking publicly about Galba’s bald head and wrinkled face. Galba also gave specific orders for the assassination of Clodius Macer, the legionary legate of III Augusta in Africa, for preventing the g
rain ships from sailing to Rome. And finally there was Petronius Turpilianus, the consular Nero had put in charge of the troops concentrated in northern Italy in his last days. Though he had achieved nothing and had returned to Rome “a helpless old man,” he was unswervingly loyal to Nero, and for that he was made to pay.
This did not close the list of victims. Next came an episode Galba’s apologists have done their utmost to minimize, the massacre that attended his arrival at the Milvian Bridge on the outskirts of Rome, sometime in the first half of October. Though Nero put together an impromptu legion from the marines of the imperial fleet stationed at Misenum, he had not the time to constitute them formally. So a sizable number of the men, perhaps between 1,000 and 2,000, gathered at the bridge, and pressed Galba obstreperously to confirm their status. Outraged, he refused to hear their requests. Ordinary people, however, expected an emperor to deal with their problems at once. So the demonstrators rioted, some even drawing swords. Galba’s response was to turn his infantry and cavalry loose on the rioters and “many thousands” were killed. Though a fitting conclusion to the “long and bloody march” from Spain, it was a terrible start to the new reign. Small wonder that Suetonius characterizes Galba’s principate as one that alienated every order of society, though “the soldiery detested him above all.”
Not that this ended the slaughter. The fallout from this affair illustrates three of the character traits that made Galba so poor an emperor. First, deciding that the survivors deserved exemplary punishment, he demonstrated his love for ages past by reviving the custom of decimation. This required that one (not nine) in ten soldiers of any military unit guilty of cowardice or insubordination be put to death by their peers, while all the other armed forces at the commander’s disposal were paraded to witness the ceremony. On this occasion the citizenry also watched the carrying out of the sentence. To justify his action Galba could appeal to the military code, in which death was the penalty for numerous offenses. But the code went back to the republican period, when the state had been protected by a citizen militia and exemplary punishment served what was considered a useful purpose. Under the principate most generals shunned rigorous enforcement, probably because they recognized how unrealistic it was to apply such rules to an army of long-term professionals. As a result, decimation had not been used to punish cowardice since early in Tiberius’ reign, nor to punish insubordination since 49 B.C. But Galba was not to be deterred. He took pride in his severity.
Second, there is Galba’s legalistic turn of mind. In his youth, Suetonius tells us, Galba had made a special study of the law. What this produced ever after was a devotion to literal meanings and pettifogging attitudes. In Spain, as a result, the legion Galba began raising in April, VII Galbiana, was constituted formally on 10 June, not coincidentally one day after he had been proclaimed emperor by the senate. In the same way Galba seems now to have granted the mutineers’ request, and to have given Nero’s marines formal recognition as legion I Adiutrix. In part, this may have been the result of the men’s wishes. When Caesar had faced down mutinous troops in 49 and again in 47 B.C., they had acknowledged their guilt by offering to suffer decimation to prove their loyalty. But on the second occasion Caesar had not taken the men up on their offer, and there was no more need for Galba to do so. That he went ahead anyway suggests a wish to satisfy the letter of the law. Because decimation was a punishment inflicted by legionaries on legionaries, legionaries the mutineers and the more obedient of their comrades had to become. Hence the creation of I Adiutrix probably in October, between the massacre and the decimation.
Third, there is Galba’s savagery. To decide who would die, it was customary to throw lots, and if the lot fell on the innocent as well as the guilty, that was the will of the gods and, at the same time, one of the most frightening aspects of the process. Caesar had recognized the possibility that the ringleaders of a mutiny might escape both the initial suppression of trouble and the workings of the lot. In 49 B.C., therefore, he had rigged the results to ensure that the guiltiest perished in the ceremony. Galba was too legalistic to engage in sharp practice, and yet refused to let the ringleaders go unscathed. So, after the ceremony, he rounded up the surviving troublemakers, a handful of men, and threw them in chains, intending to finish them off later. This combination of massacre, decimation, and refusal to accept the results of the decimation did untold damage to his reputation. The ex-marine members of I Adiutrix felt no gratitude to the emperor for their promotion to legionary status, given the circumstances in which it had come about. The morale of Galba’s other troops plummeted when they were made to watch the spectacle. And the people of Rome were horrified by the slaughter. There had been nothing to match its ferocity for a century or more.
This episode illustrates one more aspect of the way emperors operated in Roman times, that is, their habit of reacting rather than acting. Even if we had fuller information on Galba’s brief reign, it would be doubtful whether we could talk of his pursuing specific policies. Scholars used to take an emperor’s various actions and extrapolate programs from them. At best, this made some kind of sense out of the reign; at worst it sorted those actions into categories to which they may or may not have belonged. These days it is agreed—and it is much more likely—that an emperor reacted on an ad hoc basis to whatever problems arose. He seldom initiated policies as we understand them, and on occasion he failed even to deal with the problems with which he was confronted. This is not all. There are also entire areas of Roman government on which we have no worthwhile evidence, taxation for example. So what may look to us like a new approach by one emperor could easily have been established practice, unattested earlier precisely because the documentation is so random and so sparse.6
With Galba, we can go on a little further by taking into account the legends emblazoned on his coinage. But though coin after coin insisted on the Augustan nature of the quality advertised, this served to attach the usurper, not to the dynasty he had supplanted, but to its founder, a ruler whose virtues were accentuated by his successors’ failings. Besides, the qualities on whose Augustan nature Galba’s coins dwelt might be eminently laudable, but they were unspecific: peace, liberty, harmony between citizens (concordia), safety, and so on. And some issues may have raised wry smiles, those advertising Galba’s “equity” (aequitas) for example. Whether this “equity” denoted activity in the judicial or the monetary sphere, it was belied by Galba’s behavior and, still more, that of his entourage. And the issues that credited him with saving the lives of citizens, likewise based on Augustan models, must have looked positively bizarre. Whoever selected the legends on these issues, Galba’s conduct proved that he did not regard them as parameters within which to operate, let alone as announcements of any programs he would implement.
What made the emperor’s behavior especially unpredictable was the hold exerted over him by his pedagogues. Tacitus comments merely that the evils perpetrated by the new court were as bad as those of Nero’s reign and much less excusable. Suetonius, however, states explicitly that Galba was wholly under the thumb of Vinius, Laco, and Icelus, who moved into the palace with him and never left his side. “To them he surrendered himself so completely that he was hardly ever consistent, being one minute more rigorous and frugal, the next slacker and more careless than was appropriate in an emperor who [unlike Nero] had been elected to his position and had reached so advanced an age.” We have seen examples of Galba’s rigor and frugality already, and there are more to come. The emperor’s negligence Suetonius illustrates with the claim that “there was nothing he did not allow his entourage to knock down at auction or to grant as a favor, the imposition of taxes or remission from them, the punishment of the innocent or the pardoning of the guilty. Why, when the Roman people demanded the execution of Tigellinus and Halotus, he saved the lives of these two alone out of all Nero’s agents, even though they were perhaps the worst of the lot. What is more, he gave Halotus an important procuratorship, and he issued an edict that censured the peopl
e for their savagery toward Tigellinus.” In fact, Halotus was a minor player; as Claudius’ food-taster he had helped Agrippina poison her husband. Tigellinus, on the other hand, had been exactly the kind of minister Galba should have exterminated. That he survived was due partly to his own inaction in Nero’s last days, but mainly to Vinius’ intervention on his behalf. Vinius acted partly out of gratitude, because Tigellinus had saved the life of his daughter (Tacitus’ version, supported by Suetonius), partly because he was able to extort large sums of money from the ex-prefect (Plutarch’s version).
As a result, there are only three areas in which we can maintain plausibly that the emperor had definite, if at times inconsistent, ideas of his own. The first of these, the question of a successor, is best postponed. Galba almost certainly formed his own views on who that successor should be early in the reign, although he declined to publicize them until January 69. This left everybody else, from his own advisers down to the ordinary man in the street, to speculate in a vacuum, and so provoked a flood of gossip. Yet his reticence was not as foolish as it may look. The moment Galba announced his choice, there was bound to be so much intrigue that the court’s attention would be diverted from everything else. And since the announcement of that choice actually set in motion the events leading to his own assassination, as well as that of his designated heir, the topic can be left for the next chapter. What we need to consider here are Galba’s attempts at retrenchment and his dealings with the armed forces.
When Galba arrived in Rome, the various treasuries should have been nearly exhausted. Nero had wasted huge sums in pursuit of his pleasures. More had been expended during the brief civil war that precipitated his suicide. And though Galba had no intention of paying the praetorians the donative Nymphidius had promised them (for that he would have had to find—at an absolute minimum—135 million sesterces), it made sense to try to rebuild the state’s finances. The means he used, however, produced little money and created more unrest. He set up a 30- or 50-man commission of knights, a committee as unprecedented as it was unwieldy, and entrusted it with the task of recovering from Nero’s favorites as much as possible of the 2,200 million sesterces the late emperor had allegedly squandered on them. This turned out to be a two-stage affair, though Plutarch and Suetonius alone mention the second. In the first stage, Nero’s favorites were to be allowed to keep one-tenth of the proceeds, but would be required to turn over the other nine-tenths to the state. Since they had long since disposed of the bulk of the money, whatever they had left was concentrated in items with no resale value. This triggered the second stage. If the original recipients could not come up with the cash, the commissioners were empowered to recover it from those who had acquired items from the favorites, even if they had done so in good faith. This may not have seemed quite as iniquitous to Romans as it would to us, but it was sharp practice. In Roman law, plaintiffs were entitled to recover illegally acquired funds from a thief or from those to whom he passed those sums. So Galba decided to treat Nero’s giving the money away, retrospectively, as a criminal offense.