69 AD: The Year of Four Emperors

by Gwyn Morgan

  When the expedition reached the tiny province of the Maritime Alps, a strip of territory between Italy and Narbonese Gaul, it encountered determined opposition from Marius Maturus, the procurator. Though he had at his disposal the cohors I Ligurum, for some time past the garrison of Cemenelum (Cimiez), his administrative headquarters a few miles inland from Nicaea (Nice, of which it is now a suburb), he decided not to use this unit. When his main duty was to police the inland tribes, there was no point in leaving them unguarded while trying to deal with a threat off the coast. Instead, he called out the local militia, young men who acted as a kind of defense force in emergencies. Being untrained and inexperienced in war, they took to flight the moment they were attacked. The Othonians, however, were so provoked by their inability to kill and plunder their opponents, let alone to catch and enslave them (Ligurians were proverbially fast on their feet), that they turned their anger on the citizens of Albintimilium. “What made their conduct more odious still was the exemplary courage of a Ligurian woman. She had hidden her son from the raiders, and they had come to the conclusion that she had concealed her money with him. So they tortured her to make her reveal the hiding place, but she pointed at her womb and declared ‘he’s in here.’ And neither their terrible threats nor even death itself could induce her to modify this brave and noble answer.”

  Instead of pressing on westward along the coast, the Othonians settled down in Albintimilium. Perhaps they wanted to enjoy the fruits of conquest, perhaps they thought they had achieved their aim. In either case, the town’s fate terrified the other inhabitants of Narbonensis and they sent envoys posthaste to Fabius Valens. At this point, as far as we can tell, he was making his way south from Lugdunum to Lucus Augusti, and he could not ignore their demands for protection. As the province had originally taken the oath of allegiance to Otho, its inhabitants could not be left to repent of their switching sides to Vitellius at this juncture. So he detached from his column a force of perhaps 2,600 auxiliaries. On these Tacitus gives us a wealth of detail: there were 2 cohorts of Tungrian auxiliaries, 4 squadrons of cavalry, and the entire ala Trevirorum, 16 more squadrons of horse. Command of the cavalry, and perhaps of the entire force, was entrusted to Julius Classicus, a romanized chieftain of the Treveri.

  Eight squadrons of horse and probably three-quarters of the foot were sent to protect Forum Julii. The rest, their numbers augmented by the cohort of Ligurians and “500 Pannonians not yet under the standards” (raw recruits), were ordered to deal with the Othonians. The two sides made contact in a relatively small plain on the coast, probably near Menton (some six miles west of Albintimilium). The Othonian line faced west: on the foothills on their right wing they positioned a mix of marines and local inhabitants (perhaps pressed, perhaps volunteers). The praetorians occupied the center, on the flat ground between hills and sea. And for their left wing they used their ships, with the prows turned toward the shore (the opposite of normal practice). Since there is no mention of the urban cohorts, they may have been held in reserve, but they were more probably embarked on the ships. That would have made real the threat to the Vitellians’ flank. For their part, the Vitellians positioned the cohort of Ligurians on the foothills, to make up their left wing, drew up the Tungrian cohorts they had with them in close order on the flat ground. But since their strength lay in their cavalry, they made the Treveran horsemen their front line (the Treveri were considered among the best cavalry in the Roman army). Apparently overconfident, the horsemen led off the attack incautiously, and paid heavily for their mistake. With trained soldiers in their front, a rain of missiles (slingbolts and lances) coming in from their left flank, and the fleet making threatening moves on their right, the Treveri lost their nerve and turned tail. It sounds suspiciously like a formula, but since Tacitus asserts that the entire force could have been destroyed, had not darkness fallen, the cavalry’s retreat may have thrown their own infantry into disorder too.

  Refusing to admit defeat, the Vitellians sent for reinforcements from Forum Julii. Then they renewed the offensive some days later, and this time they caught the Othonians off guard. Victory had made the latter careless, and the Vitellians overran their outposts easily, penetrated their camp, and even caused a panic among the men on the ships. The praetorians managed to rally on a nearby hill, however, and eventually to go over to the attack. The prefects of the Tungrian cohorts made a valiant attempt to hold their ground but, like the Treveri in the first engagement, they were overwhelmed by a rain of missiles and forced to retreat. This time, however, their cavalry saved the day, encircling and wiping out the most enthusiastic of the Othonians who came up in pursuit. Tacitus gives the impression that the two sides counted this a stalemate and so withdrew, the Vitellians to Antipolis (Antibes) in Narbonensis, the Othonians to Albingaunum (Albenga) in Liguria (northwestern Italy). As he puts it, there was no formal agreement, but each force acted as if the territory in the 70 or so miles in between had been declared a demilitarized zone, the Othonians holding their fleet in check, the Vitellians their cavalry. And so the maritime expedition died aborning. Though the Othonians managed to delay Valens’ march briefly, they did nothing to alter the outcome of the war. As Tacitus goes on to say, the only effect of their raids on events elsewhere was to inspire the procurator of Corsica, Picarius Decumus, to make a pointless attempt to swing the island over to the Vitellians. He was murdered for his pains by the local inhabitants. They had no wish to be drilled for, let alone to be caught up in, a civil war.9

  Now we come to the episode that, despite the controversy still swirling around its origins, must have occurred just before the departure of the maritime expedition in February, the mutiny by the praetorian guard in Rome.10 Otho triggered the outbreak, unwittingly, when he summoned to Rome the urban cohort stationed in Ostia (cohors XVII urbana). At Ostia the unit’s principal task had been to act as a fire service, and for that it had not needed all its weapons. Whether Otho thought his purpose self-evident, or saw no reason to announce it, he probably intended to make the cohort part of the maritime expedition, and for that it had to be issued with the matériel kept in the armory in the praetorian camp. So Varius Crispinus, a praetorian tribune, was ordered to open the armory and load the cohort’s weapons and equipment on wagons. As the sources fail to state why wagons should have been needed to move this matériel when the cohort was coming to Rome, or where the wagons were to take it, various reconstructions are possible. But idiotic as it may look to those who have not served in the armed forces, the simplest solution may be that the cohort was brought to Rome to participate in a parade or review with the other units selected for the expedition. After that the force would march to its embarkation point, Ostia. Meanwhile, the wagons would convey the heavy equipment—the items not needed for the parade—from Rome to Ostia, to load it on the ships taking the force to its destination.11

  Whatever the truth, Crispinus unwisely opted to carry out his assignment at or around nightfall, hoping to finish the job without fuss or distraction. He failed to take into account the fact that any number of praetorians would be wandering about off-duty. Since they had nothing else to do, many of them were drunk (or so Tacitus declares), and since it was evening, they found his activity extremely suspicious. Unaware of any plans that required the issuance of weapons and seeing no grounds for it, they interpreted the scene as evidence of treachery on their officers’ part. From this they leapt to the conclusion that the weapons were to be distributed to the household slaves of senators for an attack on Otho. So they halted the loading, killed Crispinus and two centurions who tried to stop them, and then, grabbing weapons, they jumped on horses and rushed to the palace a mile and a half away, determined to make sure that Otho was safe and, if he was not, to massacre every senator they could find.

  At the palace Otho was presiding over a banquet he had thrown for some 80 leading senators, many of them accompanied by their wives. His guests were thunderstruck when they heard the uproar outside, and Tacitus dwells lovingly on their p
erplexity. Was this a trick by the emperor to test their loyalty, or was it an accident? Should they stand their ground and risk being taken captive, or split up and make a run for it? One minute they tried to put the best face on things, the next their fear showed through. All the while they kept an eye on Otho, but this was no comfort, since his expression was positively frightening when he was frightened himself. Having dramatized the scene, Tacitus admits that Otho had no more idea what was happening and was terrified as much for his guests as for himself. So his first moves were to summon the two prefects of the guard, and to get his guests away, through another part of the palace, long before the mutineers could break into the room. Yet Tacitus refuses to tone down his rhetoric: prominent men threw aside their every badge of rank, avoided one another’s company, and slunk away down backstreets. And to be on the safe side, few of them returned to their own homes; the majority went into hiding in the houses of friends or dependants.

  The mutineers were so worried about Otho’s safety that they were in an ugly mood by the time they reached the palace. Breaking into the banqueting room, they voiced threats one minute against their officers, the next against the senate. Small wonder that they wounded the officers who tried to slow them down, one victim being Julius Martialis, the unfortunate tribune who had had guard duty at the praetorian camp on 15 January. But only anticlimax and frustration resulted. Though reassured to find Otho unharmed, the men had no way of venting their rage and no excuse for doing so. Otho lacked the presence to calm the men at the head of the mob, and he was too short to be seen by those pressing in behind. So he climbed on a couch (a most undignified action for an emperor, says Tacitus), and only then did he bring the men under control. They still left reluctantly, convinced that they had done no wrong in showing such devotion to their emperor, and they may have gone on a rampage as they returned to the camp, taking out their anger on any person or object that caught their attention along the way.

  This is probably why Rome is said to have resembled a city captured by an enemy the next morning: shops and houses were shut up tight, the streets deserted, and the people despondent. The situation in the camp was hardly better, as the guardsmen were sullen rather than repentant. Their two prefects made their way from company to company, talking to the men, one in tough terms, the other with more leniency. When this too failed to remedy the situation, it was decided to promise the guardsmen 5,000 sesterces apiece. Tacitus fails to say if this was to be a down payment on the donative the men had so often been denied by Galba, or a donative meant to mark Otho’s accession, or just a bribe to calm them down. He implies—probably rightly—that it was only a bribe, and he asserts, unwarrantably, that it was only after this promise had been made that Otho had the courage to enter the camp. Once inside, he was immediately surrounded by the officers, indignantly demanding their own discharge because they refused to go in constant peril of their lives as a result of the troops’ distrust and refusal to carry out orders. And this, not the promise of money, supposedly brought about a change of heart in the soldiery. Of their own accord they now demanded the punishment of the men primarily responsible for the mutiny. Once again, it seems, they were more sensitive to reflections on their honor—and less venal—than is sometimes imagined.

  Tacitus turns next to the dilemma facing Otho, but perhaps to avoid the obvious, perhaps because he credits Otho with knowing his men better than we do, he does not present it in terms of the tension between officers and rankers, with the former demanding stern measures if they were to remain at their posts and the latter refusing to submit. Though that aspect of the situation is implied by his narrative, he focuses on the men, separating them into two categories. Some were ready to obey their officers and eager for an end to the anarchy, but for that reason less enthused about civil war. And there were the troublemakers, only too happy to fight a civil war, but so insubordinate in the meantime that they were a constant threat to everybody else, from the common people up to the emperor. To this audience Tacitus has Otho give a speech that is widely considered one of the historian’s most brilliant creations.

  Otho dwells on three themes. First there is an interpretation of the mutiny as proof only of the soldiery’s bravery and devotion to their emperor. These virtues they must curb, however, because they are too fierce and dangerous when misdirected, as had happened the previous night at the instigation of a handful of drunken agitators. Next comes a disquisition on the needs of military discipline. On the eve of war, the troops must recognize that they cannot expect to be told about, let alone to discuss, each move beforehand. The reasons for some orders are not divulged even to tribunes and centurions (perhaps a passing reference to Varius Crispinus’ tribulations). There can be no repetition of the previous night’s behavior on the battlefield, unless the men want to create the chaos that will enable the Vitellians to crush them. It is the men’s duty to obey, Otho’s to plan, to lead, and—for that matter—to punish. But he will execute only two men, since a mere handful had started the trouble. The rest of them must draw a line and put the whole business behind them. (Moralists incline to interpret this as weakness on Otho’s part, but decimating the marines had done Galba no good.) Finally, there must be no more threats against senators. The senate is not only an institution bound up inextricably with the glorious history of Rome. It is the agency that has conferred legality on Otho and made theirs a just cause. Vitellius is a rebel, calling on barbarous German tribesmen to destroy the very flower of the youth of Italy, the praetorians. And just as praetorians can hope one day to become senators, so it is from senators that emperors are made.

  Tacitus undoubtedly placed his account of the praetorian mutiny as late in his narrative as he could, partly, at least, to persuade his readers that Otho’s final weeks in Rome were shrouded in gloom and fear. This accords with his assertion that the guardsmen were mollified rather than pacified by the emperor’s speech. Peace and quiet did not return to the city. There was still the clash of weaponry and the outward appearance of war. Although the soldiers no longer ganged up to cause trouble, individual rankers in plain clothes supposedly roamed the streets and entered houses, looking askance at anybody whose aristocratic birth or conspicuous wealth had made him the subject of gossip. Since many believed widespread rumors that Vitellian spies had arrived to scout out the situation, suspicions ran so deep that people felt unsafe even in the privacy of their own homes. Nonetheless, so Tacitus maintains in order to prolong this dire atmosphere, the apprehension was greatest in public. Everybody waited eagerly for each fresh bit of news, but when it arrived, they had to be careful not to look too downcast if it was bad, nor less than delighted if it was good.

  It is not surprising that the senators were not reassured by Otho’s speech to the guard. The mutiny probably undermined whatever trust they had developed in their emperor, and they surely regarded its suppression as a close-run thing. Besides, the news from the north must have made them wonder if Otho could hang onto power. Hence the way Tacitus talks about the next senate meeting he called. Whenever it met, and whatever the planned agenda, the senators were impaled on the horns of a dilemma again. As Tacitus unsympathetically puts it, they could not decide how to act. To remain silent might be considered dumb insolence, to speak out would incur suspicion. They could not flatter Otho blatantly, since he was wise in the ways of sycophants. But nor could they abuse his rival explicitly, for fear that he might one day take reprisals. So they twisted their speeches this way and that, abusing Vitellius as a matter of course, although prudent senators limited themselves to generic themes. A few voiced abuse that was all too true, but only when other voices drowned out theirs, or else they buried their accusations in a torrent of verbiage.

  To accentuate the gloom, Tacitus reports prodigies that, he asserts, people might have ignored in other circumstances, but to which they paid attention now that the situation looked dire. But he gives more space to a natural phenomenon. Thanks to the mild winter, the Tiber flooded, rising much higher than usua
l and bringing down the Pons Sublicius, the oldest bridge in the city, in such a way as to dam the river. So the flood waters overran even higher ground normally spared from inundation. Many were swept away, others drowned in their shops and apartments. More serious still was the loss of livelihood: people were put out of work and could not earn the money to buy food. Not that there was much grain to be had, since the granaries and the grain market appear to have been damaged too. Also, Otho was unable to alleviate the shortage by purchasing grain elsewhere, since every penny was going to the troops. So prices rose steadily, and people in Rome began to experience the evils of war as they had not done since Augustus seized power a century before. To add to their woes, the foundations of the apartment houses were rotted out by the standing water, and collapsed when the river receded. And since the northwestern part of the city bore the brunt of the flood, the Campus Martius and the road to the north, the Flaminian Way, were blocked by debris at various points, something else people could take as an omen now that Otho was about to leave.

  Whenever the flood occurred, it was around the same time that Otho made his arrangements for the rest of the aristocracy. He placed under house arrest in Aquinum (Aquino), some 65 miles southeast of Rome, the man once thought his main rival as Galba’s successor, Cornelius Dolabella. He ordered many of the magistrates and most of the senior senators, among them Vitellius’ brother Lucius, to accompany him to the north. He had no intention of using them as advisers or ministers. They were hostages in the guise of companions, says Tacitus, to stress what an ill-assorted crew made up the entourage. Otho’s companions fell supposedly into three types. Some were old and inexperienced in war, fearful and unable to hide their fear. Some tried to win Otho’s favor and to cut a fine figure by purchasing expensive armor, fine horses, and everything needed for banquets and orgies, as if these too were essential components of a campaign (whereas men of sense, motivated by love of country, wanted only peace). And, in what may be an accurate statement, or another echo of Caesar’s description of the Pompeians on the eve of Pharsalus in 48 B.C., some took part because they were up to their ears in debt, and saw war as the best means of evading their creditors and their creditors’ attentions.