by Gwyn Morgan
When Vinius persisted in his opposition to this plan, Laco—encouraged by Icelus—nearly came to blows with him. Violence in the upper reaches of Roman society being normally verbal, this breach of decorum, combined with the mention of duty, drove Galba to a decision: they would take the more honorable course and sally forth. But again there was a delay. As a first step Piso was sent, with an escort, to the praetorian camp, to reinforce the efforts of the tribunes sent off earlier. (It was not known that they had failed.) His speech to the cohort at the palace was judged a success, and it was thought too that his being the emperor’s son would win him a more favorable hearing than that accorded to junior officers. But no sooner had he left on this mission than a rumor circulated that Otho had been killed in the camp. Whatever its origins (some thought it invented by Othonians who had mingled with the crowd, to draw Galba out of the palace), the rumor was readily believed. In fact, some claimed to have seen the killing, some to have taken part in it. And since it looked as if the danger had passed, the common people were joined now by senators and knights, and together they broke open the doors of the palace, surrounded the emperor, and loudly proclaimed their loyalty to him and their disappointment at being robbed of the chance to take revenge on Otho.
So great was the confusion that Galba hesitated again. Apparently unconvinced that the danger was past, he put on a breastplate. But before he could do anything else, the crowd swept him off his feet and hoisted him into a chair, intending to carry him to the Capitol so that he could give thanks to Jupiter Best and Greatest for his preservation. He may have been reassured to some extent by meeting a guardsman, Julius Atticus, as he left the palace. The latter was waving a bloody sword about and claiming loudly to have killed Otho. It would be easy to assume that Atticus was an Othonian, trying to throw the emperor off his guard and ensure that he left the palace. But it is just as likely that this was an audacious piece of self-advertising, designed to win its author immediate promotion and a large monetary reward. Atticus received neither. Never one to pass up the chance of playing the disciplinarian, Galba inquired who had given him his orders. Even imaginary displays of initiative were not appreciated by an emperor inflexible in the face of threats and flattery alike.
Otho meanwhile was being given a tumultuous welcome by the rankers in the praetorian camp (their officers they kept well away from him). Carried around on the men’s shoulders, he was set down eventually on the raised mound in front of the HQ building, amid the standards of the cohorts and on the spot occupied previously by a statue of Galba. The enthusiasm of the guard was so great that his partisans had no difficulty persuading the rest of the men to declare their allegiance. Then the oath was administered to the former marines of I Adiutrix, who by now had joined the praetorians in their camp, and they took it without exception. At this point Otho must have made a speech to the assembled soldiery, but we have only Tacitus’ version. The original was probably neither as carefully organized nor as eloquently expressed. Yet the historian’s version may preserve the themes Otho chose to emphasize.
According to Tacitus, Otho’s main goal was to induce his audience to take the next step and kill their legal emperor. So he pointed out, first, that the welcome they had given him bound them together indissolubly. Now they must finish the job or submit to punishment by Galba, when his record proved that there was no hope of leniency. The emperor had put to death men of high rank and low, soldiers and civilians, individuals and groups, not only in Rome but in every camp and province of the empire, and each time he masked his ferocity with claims to have “restored discipline.” Although Icelus and Vinius in a mere six months had managed to amass fortunes larger than those accumulated by all Nero’s favorites put together, Galba prated about “economy” to cover up his tight-fistedness, and refused to pay the troops the donative promised by Nymphidius. Nor, finally, was the situation going to change for the better. Galba had picked as his successor a young man embittered by exile, a man who, in the emperor’s opinion, best matched his own grim disposition and meanness. And the gods had shown their displeasure with the storm that attended the announcement of the adoption.
The senate and people, so Otho supposedly continued, were as unhappy with this as the troops were, but only the troops could act. There would be no fighting and no danger. All the armed forces were with them, and the cohort on duty at the palace was not so much protecting Galba as detaining him. It too would swear the oath of to Otho, the moment it caught sight of the rest of the guard (this at least turned out to be true). The only contest then would be to see who could put Otho under the greatest obligation. But they had to begin at once. They must not delay carrying out a plan that was honorable enough, but would only be perceived as such if it succeeded (Otho’s variation on the dictum that if treason “prosper, none dare call it treason”). Having roused his audience to a fever pitch, Otho ordered the armory opened, and the men rushed to grab whatever items of equipment came to hand. Nobody waited for tribunes or centurions to give them orders, says Tacitus, and Otho’s keenest supporters were delighted by the distress they saw in the faces of the officers still loyal to Galba.
Piso heard this uproar as he approached the camp and, turning on his heel, caught up with Galba in the Forum. Since the emperor had learnt by now that his other emissaries had been no more successful in their appeals to the soldiery, there was another discussion. Some of his entourage urged a return to the palace, some that he should take refuge on the Capitol (Brutus and Cassius had done that after murdering Caesar), and some that he occupy the speakers’ platform in the Forum, presumably to try to rally the people behind him. The argument these suggestions provoked added to the confusion, and Tacitus claims that Laco considered killing Vinius out of hand, “perhaps to placate the soldiery with his death, perhaps because he believed him a member of Otho’s conspiracy, or perhaps just because he hated him.” The story points up the disunity prevailing in Galba’s following, and explains why many of the more prominent lost heart and began to slip away. Galba was unable to regain control. Still in his chair, he bobbed about above the heads of a crowd that ebbed and flowed this way and that in the center of the Forum. Meanwhile the citizenry gathered in the porticoes and temples around its edges, as silent and yet as keyed up as they would have been at the start of a chariot race. They cannot have imagined that Galba would be murdered, but they could not resist waiting to see what happened next.
The cavalrymen whom Otho had ordered to carry out the assassination now galloped into the Forum. Waving their swords over their heads, they trampled down any who got in their way. For Galba’s escort, the praetorian cohort from the palace, this was enough. They threw down their arms, and as Galba’s bearers panicked, he was toppled from his chair. He was killed on the ground, before he could get to his feet, but he met his end bravely. As Roman aristocrats considered a man’s last words the index of his character, Galba’s were reported variously. Some alleged that he asked what wrong he had done and begged for a few days to pay the overdue donative. A majority asserted that he offered his throat to the soldiery, telling them to strike and be done with it, if they thought that best for Rome. As Tacitus puts it, his killers (rankers all) did not care what he said, and admiration or hatred of the emperor determined which version members of the upper classes preferred. There was also a dispute over the identity of his killer, but this rested on practical considerations: the soldier actually responsible could expect a huge reward from Otho. All we know for certain is that Galba’s head was cut off, to be carried to Otho, and that the body was left lying where it had fallen, in the middle of the Forum.
Of the others in Galba’s party, Laco and Icelus got away. Vinius too turned and fled, but he was cut down from behind. He tried to evade his fate by insisting that Otho had not ordered his death, but it is uncertain whether he invented this claim on the spur of the moment or was admitting complicity in the plot (Tacitus prefers the second explanation). By contrast, a centurion of the praetorian guard showed real brave
ry. Sempronius Densus, leader of the men assigned to escort Piso, drew his dagger and rushed to meet the enemy. It cost him his life, but it gave the wounded Piso time to find refuge in the nearby temple of Vesta. Sheltered by the slave in charge of the building, he must have remained hidden for some time. When Otho was brought Galba’s head, he told the men that it was Piso’s he wanted, and two soldiers were detailed to find and kill his rival. One was a speculator, the other an auxiliary soldier only recently given Roman citizenship by Galba and, apparently, more determined on that account to prove his devotion to the new emperor. The two had little trouble in locating Piso, and since Romans (unlike Greeks) did not recognize the right of sanctuary, they dragged him from his hiding place and murdered him before they even got him out of the temple.
Whatever Otho’s feelings on being presented with Galba’s head, it was Piso’s that delighted him and the sources say that he feasted his eyes on it, as if free of all anxiety now that the business was concluded. Alternatively (this is Tacitus’ less plausible suggestion), he was so overcome by the memory of his treachery to Galba and his friendship with Vinius that he could justify what he had done only by putting the emphasis on the murder of the hated Piso. The troops found their satisfaction in sporting with Galba’s head. Because he had been bald, so the story goes, the soldier who cut off the head either wrapped it in his cloak or stuck his thumb in its mouth and carried it that way (these details come from Plutarch and Suetonius, neither of them concerned to preserve the decorum appropriate to a narrative of high events). Since this made it difficult for others to see the head, the soldier impaled it on his spear and brandished it down the road from the Forum to the camp. There it was paraded around like a trophy, along with those of Piso and Vinius, amid the standards of the cohorts and the eagle of I Adiutrix. Meanwhile, the troops tried to top each other’s stories. Some claimed to have done the killing, some to have participated in it, and all—truly or not—to have carried out some memorable deed. More than 120 petitions for rewards would be handed to Otho, and discovered in the palace by Vitellius. As Tacitus says, Vitellius ordered every last one of the men hunted down and executed. It was not that he had any respect for Galba or any concern to highlight Otho’s failure to punish the murderers. He wanted to deter future assassins.
Otho, by contrast, shunned reprisals, except in two cases—Laco and Icelus—and only in one did he act openly. Plutarch reports that Laco was killed in the Forum and his head taken to Otho. This is probably wrong, since Tacitus declares that Laco was rounded up later and led to believe that he would be exiled to an island off the coast of Italy (the standard punishment for those of the high rank Laco now enjoyed). Once he reached the island, however, Laco was killed by a veteran whom Otho had sent on ahead to take care of the matter. Since there was no reason to deceive Laco (he was in no position to protest), this trickery was probably designed to appease public opinion. Laco had never been hated like Vinius, only despised as an incompetent buffoon. But as Otho called a halt to the killing immediately after the slaughter in the Forum, he could not afford to execute any of Galba’s free-born associates later, no matter when they were caught. Icelus, on the other hand, was crucified openly, wearing the newly acquired rings that marked the equestrian status that should have saved him from an ignominious death. But he was a freed-man, and persons of quality lost no sleep over the death of an avaricious ex-slave.
Otho showed similar restraint in his dealings with those whose kinsfolk had been murdered in the Forum. The bodies were left lying where they had fallen till late in the evening, when Otho permitted the relatives to take care of their burial. They had to ask permission, because the corpses were viewed as those of executed criminals, and permission could be refused if the emperor wanted to inflict more infamy on his victims. However, Otho left the relatives with the task of redeeming the heads the killers had retrieved after the parade through the camp, in order to realize a tidy sum of ransom money on them. Piso’s corpse was cremated by his wife Verania and his brother Crassus Scribonianus, Vinius’ by his daughter Crispina. (His ill-gotten gains were seized by the new emperor.) Tacitus asserts that nobody had the desire or the nerve to claim Galba’s corpse that day, but this need not contradict Plutarch’s assertion that the insufferable Helvidius Priscus undertook the task. All we have to assume is that Helvidius acted on the next day, partly out of gratitude to the emperor for recalling him to Rome, and partly out of disgust at the failure of anybody else to come forward. It was certainly on the next day that the head was recovered, from a group of soldiers’ slaves and sutlers. They had been amusing themselves with it in front of the tomb of Patrobius, one of the Neronian freedmen Galba had executed after his arrival in Rome. And so the man who had given Vindex a state funeral at last received burial, though it was one of his own bailiffs, a former slave named Argius, who carried out the task.
The sources themselves found it hard to summarize Galba’s character and achievements. He had enjoyed a long and relatively distinguished career, but his ancestry and his wealth seem to have cloaked a certain lack of ability, and this is the point behind Tacitus’ comment that everybody agreed that he would make an excellent emperor until he took on the job. Nor was this lack of ability counterbalanced by a winning personality. In a private citizen, a preference for old-fashioned ways, a frugality scarcely distinguishable from miserliness, and a blind insistence on discipline were all unfashionable in a permissive age. Such traits could not be considered vices, when they recalled the heroes of early Roman history, men long since elevated into role models for later generations. But they were not virtues either, especially in the eyes of a populace schooled by Nero’s 14-year reign to expect bounty at every turn. As Tacitus put it, Galba lacked vices rather than possessed virtues. In Rome, again, old men were expected to be wise, like Augustus, or at least crafty, like Vespasian. But they were also supposed to be authority figures whose sternness was tempered by a readiness to forgive human frailties, a role Augustus and Vespasian played to perfection, each in his own way. Although Galba had been out of circulation for nearly 20 years, or perhaps because of it, people seem to have expected him to live up to this stereotype. As emperor, however, he demonstrated neither wisdom nor craftiness, let alone forgiveness. He deluded himself about the strength of his own position and the best means of reinforcing it. And his integrity could never compensate for his failings, especially when he surrounded himself with rogues whom he trusted to excess. Since he had never enjoyed as much support as he fancied, his defects and the delinquencies of his entourage combined to ruin them all. Plutarch may sum up the situation best: Galba left behind none who wanted him as their emperor, but many who pitied the manner of his death.
4
The Opening of the Vitellian Offensive (January and February)
While Otho horrified people by murdering Galba, Vitellius outraged their sensibilities by omitting to proclaim his respect for the constitutional proprieties. Whereas Otho called a senate meeting to secure legitimacy for his coup within a matter of hours, Vitellius and his supporters dispensed with appearances. So far as we can tell, there was no dispatch to the senate. There was no justification for his being hailed emperor by the armies on the Rhine. There was certainly no claim to be saving the state or ridding the world of a tyrant. And on his earliest coinage there was scarcely a reference to the senate and people of Rome. Some issues bore conventional legends like “Liberty restored” (LIBERTAS RESTITVTA) or the “rebirth of Rome” (ROMA RENASCENS). But these were outnumbered by those advertising the “agreement of the armies” (CONSENSVS EXERCITVVM), the “loyalty of the armies” (FIDES EXERCITVVM), or—whether an example of wishful thinking or an attempt to reassure Vitellius’ own legions—the “praetorians’ readiness to make common cause” with the rebels (CONCORDIA PRAETORIANORVM).1
This indifference to decorum is better attributed to inadvertence than to policy. Whether we call it an unconventional, even self-destructive streak, or an ongoing failure to grasp the importance of
observing the usages of polite society, odd behavior shows up in every generation of Vitellius’ family. As Suetonius tells us, eulogists had equipped them with a pedigree stretching back into mythological times. Yet the first Vitellii in the historical record are supposed to have been two patrician brothers who led an unsuccessful conspiracy to restore Tarquin the Proud to his throne in Rome, even though their sister Vitellia was married to the virtuous Lucius Brutus who had driven out the tyrant (Plutarch is our source for this snippet). In fact, of course, there was no link between this trio and Vitellius’ family, but there might as well have been. Though they were five centuries apart, the same kind of behavior resurfaced from the start. So the emperor’s grandfather Publius Vitellius, a knight from Luceria (or Nuceria) in Apulia in southern Italy, was put in charge of Augustus’ purse for a time. But if Dio is to be believed, he had a brother Quintus who reached senatorial rank and yet had the bad taste to fight as a gladiator at games given by Augustus in Rome in 29 B.C.
Publius fathered four boys, Aulus, Quintus, Publius, and Lucius, but though all four reached senatorial rank, three of them negated this achievement. Publius began well but never reached the consulship, and when he died in 31, it was amid allegations of complicity in Sejanus’ conspiracy against Tiberius. He need not have been guilty, but he was probably guilty of something. At the time he was prefect of the military treasury (aerarium militare), as Tacitus tells us, and he tried to commit suicide before dying of an illness brought on, apparently, by this bungled attempt to kill himself. Quintus was one of the six senators expelled or asked to resign from the order in 17, at the urging of Tiberius, for having bankrupted themselves by their extravagance. Aulus was almost blameless. He earned notoriety for the lavishness of his banquets, a detail preserved no doubt to indicate another genetic flaw inherited by his nephew to go along with the spendthrift ways of Uncle Quintus. But by dying of natural causes in the consulship he shared with Nero’s father in 32, the elder Aulus avoided further indiscretions. Lucius, the emperor’s father, alone showed outstanding ability and achieved outstanding success, not only overshadowing his brothers but also making his an impossible act for his sons to follow.