69 AD: The Year of Four Emperors

by Gwyn Morgan

  What victory Otho and his mint-master had in mind is arguable. We could see it as an announcement of the one Otho intended winning over Vitellius. But the issue is better connected with the celebrations, led by Otho personally on 1 March, for a victory gained in the province Moesia (Bulgaria, more or less), since Tacitus asserts that these were out of all proportion to the success gained.4 The Rhoxolani or “Red Alans,” one of the seminomadic Sarmatian tribes from the Caucasus area, had begun appearing along the northern banks of the Danube in Nero’s reign, and had gotten into the habit of raiding Roman territory on the southern bank during the winter, when stretches of the river froze and Roman forces stayed snug in their camps. In the winter of 67/68 they had cut to pieces two cohorts of auxiliaries. And in January or February 69 about 9,000 of their horsemen tried to repeat this success. This time, however, they were taken unawares by the weather and the Romans.

  As Tacitus tells the story, and he is our only source, the Rhoxolani were roaming the Moesian countryside, some laden with spoil, others still questing for loot, and all “keener on booty than battle.” Legion III Gallica and its auxiliaries responded faster to this raid than was expected, perhaps because the unit, newly transferred from Syria, had been toughened up by years of campaigning against the Parthians. As there was also an early, if temporary thaw, the Romans had the advantage. The Rhoxolani fought superbly on horseback, with spears and two-handed swords, but poorly on foot. As their leaders wore leather-backed sheet- or scale-armor reaching from the neck to the knees, they were practically invulnerable and unstoppable in a charge. But once they were unhorsed, the weight of the armor made it impossible for them to get up again. And none of the tribesmen carried shields to defend themselves in close combat. In this encounter, therefore, their horses were unable to keep their footing because the ground was slushy; the tribesmen had to fight on foot in deep, soft snow; and the more agile Romans were able to annihilate most of the raiding party with their javelins and short swords.

  When the news reached Rome, so Tacitus claims, Otho was ecstatic. He saw to it that “consular ornaments,” the distinctions normally borne by men who had held the consulship, were granted not only to the commander of III Gallica, Titus Aurelius Fulvus (the paternal grandfather of the emperor Antoninus Pius), but also to the legates of the two other legions in the province, Tettius Julianus (VII Claudia) and Numisius Lupus (VIII Augusta). And though the ultimate credit rested with the emperor, as commander in chief, Otho wisely allowed for any claims to have coordinated the affair that might be made by Moesia’s governor, Marcus Aponius Saturninus. He was rewarded with a statue depicting him in the garb of a man who had celebrated a triumph through the streets of Rome. The rewards were excessive, but this resulted, partly, from Otho’s wish to guarantee the loyalty of these legions. (They were among the forces on whose aid he had by now called.) But Tacitus’ criticism is also excessive. He may be correct that Otho behaved as if his generals had added to the territory of the empire, when all they had done was drive raiders from Roman territory, but he is ax-grinding. He sets this incident immediately before his account of a mutiny by the praetorian guard, and to intensify the contrast, he exaggerates the celebrations of this victory on the frontiers and the uproar in the city, asserting that it very nearly destroyed Rome.

  In any event, Otho’s main problem in the area of public relations was to define his attitude toward Nero and Poppaea. Since the latter had been his wife and everybody agreed that he had truly loved her, it raised few eyebrows when he restored the statues to her that had been overthrown in the initial rejoicing over Nero’s suicide. Yet he acted not in virtue of his powers as emperor, but—seemingly to allay doubts about the implications of his action—through a decree of the senate. The situation with Nero was more complicated. Since Galba’s rule had proved such an unpleasant contrast, many outside the senate now lamented Nero’s passing, and there was no more harm in letting such people re-erect statues of Nero than there was advantage in stopping them. The problem lay in Otho’s being a one-time intimate of the emperor and, in a real sense, a throwback to his reign. On this basis, the people and the soldiery at first hailed him as “Nero Otho.” The sources report that Otho did nothing to stop this, but the real question is whether he encouraged the demonstrations. The chances are that he did not. As Plutarch and Suetonius are careful to say, it was merely an allegation that early on he signed documents as “Nero Otho,” and desisted only after influential senators expressed disapproval. There is even less reason to credit the rumor that he considered holding a memorial service for his erstwhile friend. In fact, that story may have been spread to embarrass him, and to inhibit him from giving way to further Neronian proclivities after he earmarked 50 million sesterces for the completion of the Golden House.

  The main order of business being to decide how to deal with Vitellius, Otho seems at first to have hoped to achieve a peaceful solution. He sent a letter to his rival, in which he tried to persuade him to step down by offering him money, influence at court, and a luxurious retreat in the country. The response was a letter making him the same offer. The two men continued the correspondence through the rest of January and February even so, but each exchange proved more acrimonious, and more farcical, than the last. Both ended up hurling insults at the other, and both—as Tacitus and Plutarch snidely remark—were accurate. Otho was no more successful when, in the name of the senate, he sent envoys to the Rhine legions and to I Italica at Lugdunum. The envoys, as Tacitus puts it, stayed with the enemy too readily for anyone to believe that they were being held against their will. But the praetorians who accompanied them, ostensibly as their escort, were turned back before they could mingle with the Vitellian troops. And when they returned to Rome, they brought a letter from Fabius Valens, penned in the name of the armies of Germany and addressed to the praetorian and urban cohorts. It reproached them for making Otho emperor “so long after” the title had been conferred on Vitellius by the Rhine legions, talked menacingly of the strength of Vitellius’ armies, but offered to let bygones be bygones if the addressees abandoned Otho. As the guard was not impressed by this mixture of threats and promises, the two rivals attempted finally to assassinate one another. Neither achieved his aim. Otho’s men were quickly spotted as strangers in the closed world of a legionary camp and were executed on the spot. Vitellius’ men merged easily into the cosmopolitan crowds that thronged Rome, but were never able to get close to their target.

  To this Tacitus adds another detail, meant on its face to indicate how bitter the struggle finally became. Vitellius, he says, wrote a letter to Otho’s brother Titianus, threatening him and his son with death, if harm befell Vitellius’ mother and children in Rome. The story may not be quite as straightforward as it looks, however. For one thing, it was not standard practice to take reprisals against a man’s family, least of all against the womenfolk, even though Galba had broken the rules. Again, Otho took Vitellius’ brother Lucius with him when he marched north, treating him no differently than he did all other members of his entourage, while Vitellius’ wife Galeria seems to have been protected by the fact that one of Otho’s principal associates was Publius Galerius Trachalus. Third, the letter was addressed to Titianus, suggesting that it was written after Otho’s departure from Rome, when his brother had charge of the city. So Tacitus may be sneering at Titianus, for whom he had unmitigated contempt. Two more details may confirm this. Plutarch states that before Otho marched north, he took strong measures to ensure the safety of Vitellius’ wife and mother, something he need not have done unless he was aware of a vindictive streak in his brother. And Tacitus uses odd wording to end his acount: both houses survived, “under Otho perhaps from fear, while Vitellius in victory took credit for clemency.”

  Whatever hopes Otho pinned on a peaceful solution, he was neither so shortsighted nor so complacent as to shun preparations for war. Before we can discuss them, however, it is important to recognize that three different problems are raised by Tacitus’ narrative of
the two months that Otho spent as emperor in Rome (mid-January to mid-March). First, his account deals with Otho’s actions, not with Otho’s plans, especially if those plans—like his initial ideas on how to counter the Vitellians—failed to bear fruit. Second, his narrative may look as if it follows a chronological order, but it does not. Although Tacitus provides a blow-by-blow description of the first two days of the reign, thereafter he lays out much of the material by categories. In episodes like Otho’s exchange of letters with Vitellius this makes little difference. It does when Tacitus groups together Otho’s attempts to win over specific groups in provinces like Africa and Cappadocia.5 Third, Tacitus revels in juxtaposing episodes that create the strongest possible contrast. So the Rhoxolani’s raid into Moesia is set against the mutiny by the praetorian guard in Rome, and the only indication of their interrelationship in time is a “meanwhile.” And this bears on our immediate subject, because it can be maintained that Otho began preparing for war before the close of January, even if he took few substantive measures before the start of March.

  In Rome Otho had no battle-hardened troops to oppose Vitellius’ forces. There was the newly formed legion of ex-marines, I Adiutrix, but nobody can have expected it to fight as well as it did. Otherwise, Otho had at his disposal only parade and paramilitary units, the 12 cohorts of the praetorian guard and 4 or 5 of the urban cohorts. To make a fight of it, he needed the seven legions stationed in the Balkan provinces, Dalmatia, Pannonia, and Moesia. If Otho heard by 25 January that these units had sworn allegiance to him, we can assume that he soon gave them, if not their marching orders, at least a sign of what he expected from them.6 What he had in mind we do not know, but it is a reasonable guess—if only a guess—that he meant from the first to march north with the forces he had in Rome, to rendezvous in northern Italy with at least the four legions from Pannonia and Dalmatia (VII Galbiana, XI Claudia, XIII Gemina, and XIV Gemina Martia Victrix), and then—weather permitting—to cross the Alps into Gaul and do battle with the Vitellians wherever they might be found.

  If so, Otho had to jettison this plan when he learnt that the Vitellians were approaching Italy in two columns, and we can date that around the middle of February. That is when he could have gained the information either from the diplomatic exchanges with Fabius Valens or from the complaints surely made by the Helvetii against Caecina. This development still left Otho with the possibility of holding the Alpine passes against the invaders, and this might help to explain why he chose no less than three senators to serve as his commanders: Suetonius Paulinus, “thought to be the best general of his day,” the faithful Marius Celsus, and Appius Annius Gallus, a man who had held the consulship in the latter part of Nero’s reign. Yet this plan had to be abandoned too, probably before the start of March. Once the ala Siliana seized control of the four cities in the area north of the Po, Otho was forced to realize that the river would have to become his first line of defense. Not that he could afford to settle for its southern bank. As the Balkan legions had to enter Italy by way of Aquileia to join up with him, he had to hold the northern bank too, at least at the eastern end of the peninsula.

  These changes made no difference to the essence of Otho’s plan. So far as we can tell, he still meant to concentrate his main forces in northern Italy and to fight the decisive battle there. But the speed at which the Vitellians were moving caused him to introduce three modifications. First, he must by now have ordered the Balkan legions to begin their march to Italy, whether or not he also instructed them to send detachments of 2,000 men apiece ahead of the main body.7 Then, to ensure his hold on the line of the Po, he sent off an advance force of some 10,000 men, comprised of five praetorian cohorts, legion I Adiutrix, a large (but unspecified) number of cavalry detachments, and 2,000 gladiators, all of them under the command of Annius Gallus. And finally, he dispatched a maritime expedition to the southern coast of Gaul (Gallia Narbonensis).

  Of all these measures the maritime expedition is the most controversial by far. Tacitus’ account is our only source, and he is as vague about the strength of Otho’s force as he is about its goals, apparently because he followed a source that was well informed only about the Vitellians’ countermeasures. He asserts, for example, that Otho decided to attack Narbonensis “with a strong fleet.” Yet this fleet cannot have been large. Though Otho won the marines’ loyalty by restoring to I Adiutrix the handful of trouble-makers Galba had imprisoned in October, and so by inspiring the rest with the hope that they too would see promotion to legionary status one day, he held back—or at any rate had available—a sizable number of marines for his own march to the north. Again, the number of troops embarked on the ships was relatively small. The landing force, Tacitus declares, was made up of the urban cohorts and “many praetorians.” His wording implies that Otho mobilized the urban cohorts stationed in Rome, and probably others too (at least those quartered in Ostia and Puteoli), but these units seem to have been included to make up the numbers, while the “many” praetorians were to do the fighting. And these praetorians could have totaled as few as 1,000 to 1,500 men, drafts taken from each cohort rather than entire units. Then there are the ranks of the men Otho put in charge: Aemilius Pacensis had been the tribune of an urban cohort until he was cashiered by Galba, while his colleagues Antonius Novellus and Titus Suedius Clemens were senior centurions (primipilares). Tribunes and senior centurions were not given charge of major expeditions.

  As for what the expedition was supposed to achieve, it is just as well that it is unsafe to deduce intentions from results. Whatever Otho had in mind, it was not the failure the expedition proved to be. This, however, does not justify our dismissing as baseless the contemptuous manner in which Tacitus reports the campaign, nor our going to the opposite extreme, as do theories that credit Otho and his advisers with specific, far-reaching plans. To claim that the objective was to assert Othonian naval supremacy in the western Mediterranean is meaningless as well as anachronistic: the Vitellians had no ships and needed none. Difficulties crop up too, if we adopt the more limited view that the Othonians meant to seize control of the Aurelian Way, the road running along the southern coast of Gaul, by way of Arelate (Arles), Aquae Sextiae (Aix), Forum Julii (Fréjus), Antipolis (Antibes), and Albintimilium (Ventimiglia), from there to Genoa, and so down to Rome. Valens had no reason to follow this route, Otho and his advisers no reason to imagine that he would. The road was easy and free from snow, but the Apennine range lay to the east of Genoa and effectively blocked Valens’ column from joining up with Caecina’s.

  The suggestion that the expedition was supposed to make an attempt on Forum Julii itself looks more attractive, especially as the town was an outstation of the Misene fleet. It might even be argued that the Othonians hoped to use the facilities as a means of extending their own time on station and radius of action.8 But even this is probably too ambitious. It is wiser to adopt Henderson’s explanation. Though he overstated his case, he held that the Othonians wanted simply to raid the southern coast of Gaul. This would create an uproar that would delay the advance of Valens’ column, and perhaps divert it from its primary mission, the invasion of Italy. By the third week of February, the date when the expedition apparently set sail, Otho must have known not only that the Vitellians were advancing in two columns, but also that Valens’ was the stronger. Whether he knew too that Caecina was making faster progress (he may have done), he could reasonably hope to defeat him with the forces at his disposal, while vigorous action by the maritime expedition delayed Valens long enough to allow the Balkan legions to reach northern Italy first. With these reinforcements, Otho would then be able to dispose of Valens’ column too, when it appeared.

  Although this expedition must have followed the mutiny of the praetorians, it will be best to finish the story here, since it was only a sideshow. According to Tacitus, then, the force set sail from Ostia and made its way up the western coast of Italy. Problems arose at once. There was strife between the commanders: Aemilius Pacensis was thrown in
chains, and Antonius Novellus was ignored. So effective command devolved on Suedius Clemens, “a popularity seeker more interested in winning victories than in enforcing discipline.” Worse still, the fleet created havoc wherever it put in, even before it had passed the confines of Italy. Like invaders in enemy territory, the men pillaged, murdered, and burned their way up the coast (how often Tacitus is careful not to say, but it would have taken the fleet something like four days to sail to Gaul). This “was all the more terrible, because nowhere had precautions been taken against such horrifying actions. The fields were full of people and livestock, the houses open and unguarded. The landowners who came to meet them, along with their wives and children, were overwhelmed by the evils of a war they never expected.” It might in any case have been difficult for Tacitus to report the expedition’s activities objectively, since the mother of Agricola, his own father-in-law, was one of the victims. But as this idyllic scene deliberately recalls the picture of Italy painted by Sallust on the eve of Spartacus’ revolt, Tacitus is obviously trying to bring these Othonians down to the level of gladiators and runaway slaves.