69 AD: The Year of Four Emperors

by Gwyn Morgan

  At first, there was a massive silence, and then all hell broke loose. Had the glory of the German legions fallen so low, they asked one another, that they should hand themselves and their weapons over to the foe without a fight, without even taking a wound. What were the legions that faced them now, if not ones they had defeated? They did not even include legions XIV Gemina Martia Victrix and I Adiutrix, the backbone of the Othonian army, and they themselves had routed and laid low those same troops on these same plains. To think that Caecina should make a present of so many thousands of men, as if they were a bunch of slaves for sale, to the exile Antonius. That would mean eight legions following in the wake of a single fleet. Such was the decision Caecina and Bassus had reached. Having robbed the emperor of town houses, country estates and cash money, they meant now to steal his troops too. Even fresh and unbloodied, they themselves were held cheap by the Flavians, and what answer could they give later to those who asked them what they had done in the war.

  The first to give concrete expression to their anger, says Tacitus, were the men of V Alaudae, the core of the force, and they restored the Vitellian emblems and put Caecina under close arrest. (It is interesting that though the legion had formed part of Valens’ column, the men apparently respected Caecina enough not to kill him outright.) Then the troops picked new generals, Fabius Fabullus, the legionary legate of V Alaudae, and the prefect of the camp, Cassius Longus (nothing else of significance is known about these two). While this was going on, three galleys from the Ravenna fleet put in. Their crews neither knew of nor were party to Bassus’ treachery, but they were butchered anyway. Then the Vitellians decided to abandon their position, to fall back behind the Tartarus and the Po after breaking down the bridges, and to make their way as quickly as possible to Cremona and join up with legions I Italica and XXI Rapax.

  Though Josephus condenses this episode to the point where it is almost unrecognizable, he adds one important detail taken for granted by Tacitus, the fact that the uproar in the camp continued into the night. And Dio makes a meal of this, claiming that the confusion was increased by an eclipse of the moon. Not that the moon’s disappearance troubled the men, “but that it looked blood-red and black and other frightening colors too.” Yet not even this persuaded the men to change their minds or to give up. So why mention an omen without an impact in an account of questionable reliability? If we allow that there was an eclipse, we can date the episode exactly, to 9:50 P.M. (local time) on 18 October. So few are the fixed points we have for the chronology of this campaign that we must seize on any usable snippet, so long as it looks halfway plausible.

  Antonius discovered that the Vitellians had slipped away only after the deed was done, perhaps on the following morning. Faced with the prospect of chasing around the countryside a Vitellian force with which he had lost contact, or of taking on enemy units whose location he knew, he settled on the latter course. A council of war must have been held in Verona, to discuss the risks as well as the rewards of his plan, but Antonius won the day with two arguments: that it was better to attack the Vitellians at Cremona while their forces were divided; and that it must be done promptly, because there was the risk that Valens would arrive from Rome and restore the enemy’s morale and unity of purpose. So it was decided that he should lead the troops, five legions (III Gallica, VII Claudia, VII Galbiana, VIII Augusta, and XIII Gemina), an unknown number of auxiliary cohorts, and at least 4,000 cavalry, on a two-day forced march from Verona to Bedriacum, and take up position some 20 miles east of his target.

  On the morning after his arrival at Bedriacum, however, Antonius made the first of several mistakes. His plan underestimated the spirit and energy of both Vitellian forces. Not only did he imagine that the troops from Hostilia could not arrive as soon as they did (they appeared only 24 hours later than Antonius, having made a forced march of 30 miles on that last day). He also assumed that the two Vitellian units encamped outside Cremona would not respond at once to his own arrival. Thinking that he had two days to play with, he decided on the first to leave his legionaries behind, to fortify a camp; he sent auxiliary cohorts into Cremonan territory, with orders to forage but (so Tacitus asserts) also to accustom them to the plunder of Roman civilians, and to give the auxiliaries scope to pursue their activities unmolested; he himself advanced with 4,000 cavalry eight miles down the Postumian Way toward Cremona, and told his scouts to range yet further ahead. As he saw it, he could ready the camp, bring in the supplies he had sacrificed during the march from Verona, and spy out the land all on the first day, and then draw I Italica and XXI Rapax from their camp by offering battle on the second, before their comrades from Hostilia could reinforce them.

  Around 11:00 A.M., however, one of Antonius’ scouts rode in with the news that the enemy were approaching. The vanguard of the Vitellian cavalry was close at hand, while “the movement and noise of the main body could be heard over a considerable distance.” While Antonius hesitated, thrown off by this unexpected development, his second-in-command, the impetuous Arrius Varus, rounded up the boldest of their cavalrymen and charged off to engage the enemy. Initial success turned into defeat, as more and more Vitellian horses came up, and though the Flavians managed a fighting retreat, Varus himself lost his head. By now Antonius had recognized that the situation was out of hand, and had summoned the legions from Bedriacum and called in his foragers from the fields. But he also took the very risky step of trying to leave a gap in the center of his battle line, so that his cavalry could pass through to safety. Instead, Varus’ panic threw everything into chaos, and the Flavians were driven back along the road, probably for a considerable distance.

  Tacitus lauds Antonius’ prowess as a general in this crisis, but even if he ignores the fact that Antonius caused the crisis, the praise is two-edged. The description he provides owes much to Sallust’s account of Catiline’s last stand at Pistoria in January 62 B.C., and this literary debt proves that the historian has not forgotten his original assessment of Antonius as the worst kind of man to have around in peacetime but not one to underrate in war. In any event, he states that Antonius displayed the best qualities of a general, even killing with his own hand a fleeing standard bearer, picking up the standard and turning it toward the foe. Though less effective than it might have been, this persuaded about 100 cavalrymen to join him, and since the ground too was favorable, that turned out to be enough. Antonius had come upon a wooden bridge over a rivulet or stream. This being a structure his men could break up temporarily, Antonius made his stand here, and the Vitellian cavalry were checked. This heartened the rest of his troops to rejoin the fray, and the pursuers became the pursued.

  Though all the Flavian troops must have covered ten or more miles in this race for Cremona, and some of them between 16 and 18 miles (men rushed up from the camp at Bedriacum), Tacitus cuts away from the chase, as usual, to focus on the scene four miles from Cremona. This was as far as the Vitellian legions I Italica and XXI Rapax had advanced. Although their aim was probably to back up their own cavalry, but not to fight a pitched battle unless the circumstances looked favorable, Tacitus pictures these units as poor specimens.

  Now that fortune had turned against them, they did not open up their ranks and receive back their defeated cavalry. Nor did they move forward and attack the enemy, even though the latter were weary from the distance they had covered and the fighting in which they had engaged. Immobilized by their own cavalry’s setback, the two legions stood rooted to the spot, missing in adversity, as they had not done in success, a general to give them orders. As they wavered indecisively, the victorious Flavian cavalry along with Vipstanus Messalla and a force of Moesian auxiliaries charged them. And since a goodly number of light-armed Flavian legionaries had managed to catch up and stay with them, this mix of infantry and cavalry broke the Vitellian line. And because the nearness of Cremona’s walls encouraged thoughts of refuge rather than resistance, Antonius called off the attack, mindful now of the exhaustion of and casualties among his own me
n and reluctant to tempt fate once more.

  Most of the criticism in this passage seems to have been designed more to excuse Antonius than to belittle his adversaries. The Vitellians’ being chided for not opening up their ranks and receiving their cavalry helps to palliate Antonius’ attempting such foolishness earlier, and the stress on the Vitellians’ lack of leadership highlights the Flavians’ being well served in this regard. The one true oddity in the two legions’ conduct was their failure to advance to the attack, and this is explicable too. If it never even occurred to the Vitellians that Antonius had advanced without his own legionaries, they would have imagined that becoming entangled in a battle would lead eventually to their being overwhelmed by sheer numbers. So they just held their ground. They also left the field in better order than one might think. The nearness of Cremona induced thoughts of refuge rather than resistance, not thoughts of refuge instead of resistance. And this best explains Antonius’ not pressing on. He had made a string of errors, but he had prevailed. Now he showed sense enough to halt the attack while he was ahead.

  Not that the main body of Flavian troops shared his view when it reached the scene around 5:00 P.M. Impressed by the evidence of the victory, the men concluded that the war was all but over, and demanded to be led to Cremona forthwith. Publicly they supposedly claimed that they could either accept the enemy’s surrender or take the place by storm. But privately, says Tacitus, they thought that if they waited till daybreak, there would be a negotiated surrender, and that all they would get for their efforts would be a reputation for mercy and empty talk of glory, while the wealth of Cremona ended up in their officers’ pockets. When a city yielded, the loot went to the higher-ups. When a city was stormed, it went to the troops. Tacitus must have drawn this material from Vipstanus Messalla, and it is an interpretation that is not only plausible, but also consistent with assessments made in similar circumstances by other generals, Julius Caesar included. But it is also a first step in an attempt to explain the sack of Cremona rationally and accurately.

  The second step follows immediately. The troops were so determined to march on Cremona, says Tacitus, that they refused to obey their officers, and made so much noise that they could claim colorably not even to have heard the orders they issued. So, taking the bull by the horns, Antonius made his way from company to company, and delivered a speech that opened with the same theme as Otho had stressed in his address to the praetorians the day after their mutiny. Reassuring the men that he had neither the wish nor the intention to rob them of their plunder, he emphasized that it was the troops’ task to fight, their generals’ to take care of the planning. To enter an enemy city with which they were unfamiliar in the dark was folly. They could be ambushed at every turn. Even if the gates stood wide open, he was not prepared to enter except in daylight, and he would still check everything out first. Then he shifted to the problems they would face if the city resisted. Unless they reconnoitered the ground, there was no telling whether they would need only the weapons for an assault or all the impedimenta for a siege. Turning to individual soldiers, he asked them whether they had the tools for the job, or if they intended standing like dummies outside the city, gaping at the towers and the fortifications on the walls. If they were willing to wait just one night, they could bring up the artillery and the force to win outright. This said, he sent the sutlers and the freshest of the cavalry back to Bedriacum to fetch the supplies and equipment they had left behind. Yet his words had no effect. What brought the men round was a report by their own scouts that the Vitellians in Cremona had been reinforced meanwhile by the troops who had trekked all the way from Hostilia.

  So why does Tacitus credit Antonius with a long and futile speech? Once the question is framed in these terms, it does not matter whether Antonius made a speech, or whether he made this speech. Tacitus is after something else. First, he is drawing attention to one of the predicaments faced by generals in a situation like this, that the worse conditions grew, the more the general had to speechify. And second, he is emphasizing that on this occasion the situation was so bad that even the best of mob-orators could not win over the men. Tacitus is not endorsing the overarching theme so prominent in Plutarch, that in these civil wars the troops led and the generals followed. His scope is narrower, to lay more groundwork for the sack of Cremona. And he does not acquit Antonius of culpability. The disagreement between the general and his men was not whether to storm Cremona, but when to do it. But the more determined the troops were made to appear, the heavier the onus that could be placed on their shoulders.

  The Vitellians were no less determined, as was proved by the fact that the troops from Hostilia had covered 30 miles in a day. What is more, the Flavian scouts reported that these units had no sooner reached Cremona and learnt of the setback suffered by their comrades than they began preparing to march out again, and “would arrive at any minute.” This brought Antonius’ troops to heel, enabling him to draw up his forces for an engagement on the Postumian Way. He placed XIII Gemina on the actual causeway; VII Galbiana occupied the open ground on its left (i.e., south of the road), while VII Claudia held the extreme left, on ground fronted by a drainage ditch. To the right (north) of the causeway he positioned VIII Augusta along an open side road, and beyond it III Gallica, though its ranks were split into small groups by close-planted vine trellises. This was their order of battle, Tacitus then adds, but in the darkness the troops took up position more randomly. Though this is an oblique way of reminding the reader that a night battle is about to take place, the rarest of encounters in Greek and Roman times, the comment also enables Tacitus to avoid explaining oddities like the way in which a batch of Otho’s former praetorians suddenly appears out of nowhere, to be set next to III Gallica.4

  For the Vitellians, as Tacitus observes, the best plan would have been to take a break in Cremona, eat some food and catch up on their sleep, and then attack the following morning, when the Flavians had spent a night in the open, worn down by the cold and by lack of food. But “because the Vitellians lacked a leader and a plan,” they advanced and made contact with Antonius’ forces at about the third hour of the night (approximately 8:30 P.M.). Numerically, they were more or less a match for their opponents. Besides I Italica and XXI Rapax, they could muster two more full legions (V Alaudae and XXII Primigenia), the bulk of another four (I Germanica, IV Macedonica, XV Primigenia, and XVI), and detachments (vexillationes probably of 2,600 men apiece) from the three units out of Britain (II Augusta, IX Hispana, and XX Valeria Victrix). They had their auxiliaries and cavalry too. Tacitus, however, hesitates to specify the Vitellian order of battle, and limits himself to repeating what “others” had reported. According to these “others,” the center of the line was held by V Alaudae, XV Primigenia, and the detachments from the British legions; XVI, XXII Primigenia, and I Germanica took up position on the left wing, on the broken ground north of the road, while IV Macedonica held the right wing, the more open area to the south. The men from I Italica and XII Rapax, Tacitus adds, joined companies along the line on a catch-as-catch-can basis. As he gives no reason for this, it has been suggested that these men had been demoralized by the earlier battle. But it is just as likely that the column from Hostilia never even broke formation when it reached Cremona, and that the town’s original defenders had to scurry after them, if they wanted to take part in the action.

  The battle itself was to last a staggering ten hours, until sunrise the next morning around 6:45 A.M., a tribute to the endurance of the troops on both sides, even if—just as in more recent battles—the fighting took place in short bursts interspersed with long lulls. Neither Tacitus nor Dio attempts a comprehensive description. If it is safe to judge by Xiphilinus’ abridgement, in fact, Dio devoted more attention to the lulls than the fighting, emphasizing how the the troops fraternized with the other side. He even talks of women from Cremona bringing out food and drink for the Vitellians, and adds that the latter shared it with their Flavian counterparts.5 Dio seems to have done
this to stress the ferocity with which the two sides fought in between times: “they battled as if against foreigners and not their own countrymen, and as if all must die at once or become slaves ever after.” Tacitus too comments on this savagery, but he presents only vignettes, putting more emphasis on the fact that “courage and strength were of little use, and the men could not even see clearly what was in front of them. Neither side had an edge in weaponry; each soon learnt the other’s password because demands for it were constant; and the unit emblems got all mixed up, as a band of troops on one side captured the others’ and carted them off this way or that.”

  Specifically, Tacitus reports that the Flavian legion VII Galbiana (Antonius’ own unit) was especially hard pressed. Positioned on the open ground south of the road, and confronted by IV Macedonica, it took heavy casualties, in part because most of the men were still raw recruits. They lost six of their senior centurions and some of their standards, and though they hung onto the legion’s eagle, it cost them the life of Atilius Verus, the centurion of the first rank whose duty it was to guard it. To stop the rot, Antonius pulled a body of praetorians from the extreme right of his line (north of the road). But though they drove back the Vitellians, the latter rallied and drove them back in their turn. This reversal, says Tacitus, was aided by the Vitellians’ artillery fire. At the start of the battle they had positioned their ballistas and catapults north of the road, with the result that much of the fire was deflected by trees and vine trellises. Now they hauled a gigantic rock-throwing ballista onto the causeway, and it began leveling the Flavian line. The results would have been catastrophic, had not two Flavian soldiers picked up Vitellian shields, slipped in unnoticed among the enemy artillerymen, and managed somehow to put the ballista out of action. These two stalwarts were cut down immediately, of course, “and so their names have been lost, but about their brave deed there can be no dispute.”6