by Gwyn Morgan
As his final official act in the city, Otho summoned a meeting of the people and delivered a speech so fluent and sonorous that many in his audience thought it written for him by Publius Galerius Trachalus, consul in 68 and somehow a relative of Vitellius’ wife. Otho stressed his role as the representative of a unified senate and people, but showed great restraint in talking of his adversaries. He refused to name Vitellius, and he accused the Rhine legions of gullibility rather than troublemaking. The people’s applause was “overdone and unreal,” says Tacitus, since they had long since been broken to servility. But whatever we make of that, Otho entrusted the running of the city and the empire to his elder brother Titianus and, on 14 March, set out for the north.12
Otho took with him the seven remaining praetorian cohorts, an unknown number of time-expired praetorians called up for the emergency, a large force of marines, and a bodyguard of speculatores. It has been estimated that the force totaled 9,000 men, but this may be too high. Certainly none of the praetorian cohorts can have been at full strength, when Otho had skimmed off detachments for his maritime expedition. Their destination was Brixellum (Brescello), some 350 miles from Rome and about 15 miles short of the position his advance guard took up at Bedriacum. And since Suetonius Paulinus and Marius Celsus had been sent on ahead a few days earlier, Otho headed the column, on foot, in an ordinary soldier’s breastplate, and (in Tacitus’ words) “ill-shaven, unkempt and quite at variance with his usual image.”
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The War between Otho and Vitellius (March and April)
Once Caecina emerged from the Alps toward the end of March, he swiftly overran much of the western half of the Transpadana, that part of Italy north of the River Po. He already had four good bases in the region, Eporedia, Vercellae, Novaria, and Mediolanum. Tacitus adds that the local inhabitants felt no loyalty to Otho or Vitellius and did not care who won the war, because a century of peace had schooled them to bow to superior force, no matter who applied it. The comment loses much of its sting as soon as we ask what else they could have done. Besides, Caecina took care not to alienate them. He kept his column on a tight rein as he moved south. And surprise appears to have been the tactic used by his advance forces, the auxiliaries sent on ahead, as they neutralized Othonian units in the area. Tacitus reports that a cohort of Pannonians was taken prisoner near Cremona, while 100 cavalry and 1,000 marines (drawn perhaps from the Ravenna fleet, perhaps from the squadron stationed earlier at Forum Julii) were captured as they made their way from Placentia on the southern bank to Ticinum (Pavia) on the northern. Tacitus does not say that Caecina’s advance guard occupied Cremona when they rounded up the Pannonians there. But if they did not, their activity was probably enough to persuade the inhabitants to open the gates as soon as Caecina himself appeared. Either way, Tacitus seems to have taken it for granted that his readers would know that Cremona and Placentia were the keys to north Italy. They had been founded in 219 B.C., the former on the northern bank of the Po and the latter on the southern, as bulwarks against invasions out of the Alps, and the Romans still viewed them as such in 69.
Tacitus’ refusal to labor the obvious enables him to dwell on what was for him a more congenial and significant topic, the petty-mindedness with which the leading townsfolk throughout the area insisted on being treated with a deference they had not earned. As Caecina marched south, Tacitus says, the magistrates of the various towns came out to meet him in full official dress. They were put out by what they regarded as the arrogance of a man who received them wearing a parti-colored cloak and Gallic trousers. As Marc Antony had once discovered, Roman commanders were expected to reciprocate by appearing in formal, not fancy, dress. Then there was Caecina’s wife, Salonina. Summoned from their home in Vicetia to join him and accompanied by a cavalry escort, Salonina either rode a fine horse with purple trappings or was so bedecked herself. Tacitus never mentions wife or horse again, but as he says, people felt insulted. It was “human nature to look with a jaundiced eye on those who had just risen to high position, and to demand moderation especially from those who had been until recently on the same social level as their critics.” There is another side to this story, however. Placentia lay some 190 miles from the Great Saint Bernard Pass, and Cremona another 20-odd miles beyond that. Caecina’s army could complete the trek in ten days or so, if not delayed unduly by welcoming committees en route. To ignore these self-important dignitaries would be impolitic. Greeting them in military garb, outlandish or not, proclaimed his determination to press on.
So Caecina took up position at Cremona, the town that became the Vitellian headquarters in the north during this war as well as in that against the Flavians later in the year. Here he could have waited for the arrival of Valens’ forces, but he decided to launch an assault on Placentia. He may have been egged on by the citizens of Cremona: the two cities had been rivals ever since they were founded, even if they were not ready to carry their feud to the extremes favored by the inhabitants of Lugdunum and Vienna. He may also have believed that his men needed—and deserved—to be let off the leash. But his primary motivation was clearly a wish to pull off another striking success. Occupying one of the two key cities in the area gave the Vitellians control of much of the northern bank of the river. To hold both would give them a bridgehead nullifying any Othonian plans to make a stand on the southern bank. The enemy would have to pull back south and east of the Po, for fear of being taken in flank. No matter where they took up position, of course, they would be able in turn to prevent Caecina from exploiting the fact that Placentia lay at the head of the Aemilian Way, the road leading to Rome. But that probably worried Caecina not at all. He would have been more than happy to sit in Placentia and rehearse the jibes he could make at the expense of Valens, his johnny-come-lately rival.
It was by no means absurd for Caecina to expect Placentia to fall into his hands like a ripe plum. His scouts must have informed him that the Othonian troops garrisoning it would be unlikely to offer effective resistance. At this stage Otho’s advance force had reached the line of the Po, but its commander, Annius Gallus, was preoccupied with holding territory further east. Gallus had to keep open the road to Aquileia, to ensure that the leading elements of the Balkan legions could join up with him, and so he set off for Verona with two of the five praetorian cohorts and the bulk of the cavalry. The defense of Placentia he entrusted to the 45-year-old Titus Vestricius Spurinna, giving him some 3,000 men, 3 praetorian cohorts, 1,000 vexillarii (a detachment probably from I Adiutrix), and a handful of cavalry for reconnaissance duties.
This force was as unruly as it was small. Tacitus considered this important enough to illustrate at length, and Plutarch provides us with another version of the episode, though he misses its paradigmatic nature. Throughout the campaign there was to be constant tension between the Othonian soldiery, who wanted only to have at their enemy, and their generals, who were more conscious of the troops’ lack of training than of their fighting spirit. The heterogeneity of Otho’s forces compounded the problem. Just as the men knew neither one another nor their officers, so the officers respected neither the men nor their capabilities. The result was endless distrust. So when Spurinna tried to keep his untested forces safe inside Placentia, they accused him of planning to surrender without a fight. Determined to do battle with the enemy, the troops threatened their officers—and Spurinna himself—with violence when they tried to restrain them. As the first, but far from the last Othonian general to be denounced for treachery by his own men, Spurinna was forced to bow to their folly.
Spurinna was able to persuade the troops to march to the west rather than the north, perhaps by passing it off as an armed reconnaissance to Ad Padum (Pievetta), the next river-crossing some 20 miles upstream. But as the Po looped away to the north here, the men found themselves tramping across open ground, terrain where they could easily have been caught and overwhelmed by Caecina’s superior forces. Nightfall brought another alarming discovery, that they must build a camp. This being e
xertion to which few of the praetorians and ex-marines of I Adiutrix were used, it prompted second thoughts. The officers seized their chance to praise “Spurinna’s foresight in selecting Placentia as a strongpoint,” and this did the trick. Once discipline had been restored, Spurinna addressed the troops, avoiding any reproaches and—not before time—explaining the reasoning behind his plan of action. Then, leaving behind a few scouts, he marched the men back to Placentia. There they set to work strengthening the fortifications enthusiastically. So “it was not only their defenses that were made ready, but also their willingness to obey, which was the one thing lacking in the Othonian soldiery, since nobody could fault their bravery.”
Whether or not Caecina was aware of Spurinna’s difficulties, he knew that his own forces were larger, tougher, and better disciplined. He may have been overconfident and impetuous too, as Tacitus charges, but it is just as possible that the historian misunderstood his plan. This was not to lay siege to Placentia, but to take it by assault. Naturally, he tried to persuade the Othonians to surrender without a fight, but determined as he was to seize the town before Valens appeared, he could not let the Othonians string out the talks and so give Gallus time to come to their aid. He continued the parleys until the last minute, therefore, and then launched an attack without warning. On the first day he sent in his troops without any standard equipment except scaling ladders, to avoid tipping his hand, and to enable his troops to cross the open ground outside the city walls as quickly as possible. But his men were overconfident and careless. According to Tacitus, they had breakfasted far too well, and were heavy with food and drink when they went into the attack.
Although Plutarch reports that the Vitellians derived vast enjoyment from abusing the praetorian defenders as “actors, dancers, spectators at Pythian and Olympic games, men who had never seen or experienced a campaign or military service, and plumed themselves on having cut off the head of a defenseless old man,” neither he nor Tacitus says more about the progress of the assault than that Caecina’s troops were driven back with heavy losses. But Tacitus fleshes out his narrative with another instance of local petty-mindedness. Outside the walls there was a wooden amphitheater, the finest and largest edifice of its kind in northern Italy according to the citizens of Placentia. This burnt down during the attack. It may have been caught in the crossfire between the two sides, or the attackers may have used it as a firing-platform from which to bombard the city. Either way, the inhabitants attributed the fire to arson by the Cremonans. Certain persons from other nearby towns, as they told one another meaningfully, were so consumed with jealousy and hatred, that under cover of the Vitellian attack they had reduced the structure to ashes.
Tacitus dwells on the way in which the two sides spent the night preparing for the next day’s fighting. The Vitellians readied the equipment they should have brought up earlier, while the Othonians collected lumps of iron and lead, millstones and the like, to drop on the attackers’ heads. Each side was inspired by the same feelings, he says, shame that they had not done better the first day, and determination to fight gloriously on the second. His love of antithesis may have led him astray. The Vitellians need not have been downcast by the failure of their first attack. But the Othonians must have been buoyed up enormously by their success in repelling men from the legions considered the finest fighters in the empire. Tacitus uses this interlude of reflection and mutual encouragement also to work in the jibes that Plutarch sets at the start of the first day’s fighting. This could be a fit of authorial caprice, but it is the only point in his narrative where he talks of the Othonians inside the walls. The attacks are presented exclusively from a Vitellian perspective.
The next assault began at daybreak on the second day. The city’s ramparts were jammed with defenders, says Tacitus, while the open plain glittered as the rising sun caught the attackers’ arms and armor. This time Caecina employed his auxiliaries to keep up a suppressing fire while the legionaries tried to undermine the walls and break through the gates. But the avalanche of missiles, rocks, and lumps of metal unleashed by the defenders created heaps of dead and wounded at every point, and since the Othonians redoubled their efforts as soon as they saw the attackers falter, Caecina called off the assault, recrossed the river, and returned to Cremona. According to Tacitus, he was ashamed of his rashness and reluctant to be mocked by the enemy, but there was no point in remaining near Placentia after the assault miscarried. Tacitus adds one last interesting detail. As Caecina withdrew, he was joined by Turullius Cerialis, a senior centurion, with “many marines” (perhaps refugees from the force captured by Caecina’s advance guard), and by Julius Briganticus, a Batavian cavalry prefect, with a handful of horsemen. Perhaps they did not regard his failure as a disaster. Or perhaps they were unhappy with the heterogeneity of Otho’s forces, allowed that to outweigh their opinion of Caecina’s prowess, and deserted a commander they did not know for one they did. According to Tacitus, both men had served in Germany, the former actually with Caecina.
Spurinna at once sent word of Caecina’s withdrawal to Annius Gallus, who was rushing back from Verona with his forces. Relieved that Spurinna had withstood the assault and, for that matter, that he would not be required to commit his own untried troops, Gallus halted at Bedriacum. This was a village near the Postumian Way, on the north bank of the Po some 22 Roman miles east of Cremona. Gallus probably picked the spot by accident, but it proved to be an excellent base at which to await the arrival of the reinforcements from the Balkan legions, and from which to check any attempts by Caecina to extend his grip on the Transpadana east of Cremona.1 His troops saw the matter differently, and there was nearly a mutiny before they could be persuaded to encamp. Apparently under the impression that they could smash Caecina’s force while it was still demoralized by its failure outside Placentia, they suspected that their general was holding back because he was not truly committed to Otho.
So fertile was this soil that it needed only one more incident to produce an uproar. This was triggered by Martius Macer and his group of 2,000 gladiators, another part of the advance force Gallus had brought north. Macer and his men had taken up position on the southern bank of the Po more or less opposite Cremona. Now they made a raid across the river, shortly after Caecina’s return from Placentia. Since Macer was a man of some experience and perhaps some seniority (Otho planned to make him consul for the last two months of 69), and since Tacitus devotes a disproportionate amount of space to this episode, it has been claimed that this raid was not just important militarily but even part of a larger plan. It was neither. Macer’s force was too small to take the offensive in any meaningful sense. Its function was to prevent nuisance raids across the Po such as Caecina’s auxiliaries had made earlier, and possibly to safeguard Othonian communications between Placentia and whatever position Annius Gallus might be occupying at any time. Also, the raid (and there was only one) was a hit-and-run affair that caught some Vitellian auxiliaries off guard, killed a few, and sent the rest scurrying in panic to the shelter of Cremona’s walls. Finally, it was Macer’s enthusiasm that prompted the raid, to spread some alarm and despondency along the northern bank of the river.
For Tacitus the aftermath matters most. When the troops encamped at Bedriacum heard of the raid and the retreat, they began denouncing all their generals, not merely Macer and Gallus. By now Suetonius Paulinus and Marius Celsus had arrived, and they were abused roundly too. It is easy to see why. The troops were tied much more closely to Otho than were their generals. Like the rest of the senators, the generals had taken no part in Galba’s murder, and the soldiery naturally suspected that they had less incentive to fight to the bitter end. Spurinna may have relieved their doubts momentarily by his defense of Placentia. But Gallus had halted at Bedriacum instead of pressing on, and now Macer had made a raid, only to withdraw at the moment of success. The men clearly thought that a pattern was beginning to emerge: their generals were pulling their punches, and for that treachery was the only explanation.
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This presented Otho with a dilemma. His generals were not as brilliant as has sometimes been maintained, but nor were they incompetents. To dismiss them might calm the troops’ suspicions, but it would harm his own standing with the generals and their peers in the senate. But if he did nothing, it would make no difference whether his generals were geniuses or not. The troops would never trust them, let alone obey their orders. So he attempted a compromise. He summoned his brother Titianus from Rome, with the idea of putting him and Licinius Proculus, the prefect of the praetorian guard, in overall command. But he also left Paulinus, Marius Celsus, and Annius Gallus at their posts. As far as we can tell, Titianus had no more military experience than Proculus, and he was not a forceful personality (one reason perhaps why Proculus was associated with him in the command). But Titianus was the emperor’s brother and his loyalty was beyond question. That was the crucial consideration. Even if Otho knew that his five generals would be unable to work in harmony all the time, he could hope that they would agree at least on the fundamentals, thus allowing his troops to focus on their primary task, fighting and defeating the enemy.