by Gwyn Morgan
If Tacitus is reporting events in any kind of chronological sequence (he may not be, since Dio sets the disabling of the ballista near daybreak), all this must have happened in the first hour or so. For the next event of which he tells us is the rising of the moon, and that occurred—it has been calculated—around 9:40 P.M. Since it rose behind the Flavians, says Tacitus, it made their men and horses look larger and therefore closer, with the result that the weapons the Vitellians hurled at them tended to fall short. Conversely, the Vitellians faced into the moonlight, and so were caught as if out in the open by an enemy firing at them from concealment. This may be a trope, inasmuch as Pompey had exploited the setting moon similarly in a battle with Mithridates of Pontus in 66 B.C. Besides, Dio has nothing of this, stating instead that the moon was hidden periodically by “many clouds of all sorts of different shapes.” But as there were only a limited number of ways in which a night battle could be fought, let alone described, it may not hurt to accept Tacitus’ account.
In any event, Tacitus conveys the impression that Antonius capitalized on this advantage at once, by making his way from unit to unit along his line and encouraging or reproaching them. The Moesian legions, for example, he is said to have egged on by pointing out that they had started this war and it was high time they transformed words into deeds. The Pannonian legions he reproved, observing that this was the ground on which they had been defeated earlier in the year, and now it was time to recover their lost glory. For the praetorians he reserved the rough edge of his tongue: for them this would be the end of the line unless they made up for the inadequacies they had shown at Bedriacum. There is no knowing how long all this took, or even if Antonius expressed himself in this manner. One could almost be forgiven for thinking that he spent nearly all night on it, since Tacitus mentions sunrise next. But this is probably his alternative to the fraternization between the individual soldiers that turns up in Dio. Both authors had somehow to create the impression of time passing.
When the sun rose, the men of III Gallica hailed it in accordance with a custom they had picked up in Syria. This act of worship, to whatever god the sun represented, was widely misunderstood. The Vitellians (according to Dio) or the other Flavian troops (so says Tacitus) fell for a sudden rumor that Mucianus’ troops had arrived, and that the two forces were greeting one another. This spurred the Flavians to one final effort, while the dispirited Vitellians began to wilt. Antonius immediately massed his men and broke through the enemy battle line. There was still some resistance, but the Vitellians were effectively routed, and the Flavians pursued them westward along the Postumian Way. There was considerable slaughter, but one incident in particular was recorded by Vipstanus Messalla, and used by Tacitus to highlight the savagery of the battle. Julius Mansuetus had been recruited into legion XXI Rapax some years earlier. He had left a young son behind in Spain, and the boy was drafted into VII Galbiana in 68, having by then grown to manhood. These two now came face to face without recognizing each other, and the son cut down his father. He discovered the identity of his victim only when he began plundering the body. Tacitus dwells on the pathos of the scene as the son tried to give his father the last rites. But, he continues, when those nearby noticed what was happening, and talk spread the news through the ranks, “there was astonishment, lamentation and much cursing of this most savage war, but there was no slackening in the killing and plundering of friends, relatives and brothers. They said a crime had been committed and they went on committing it.”
Once the Flavians reached Cremona, they found themselves confronted with another formidable task, not an attack on the town itself, but an assault on the Vitellian camp on its eastern side, outside the walls and just north of the Postumian Way. For this Tacitus is our only source, and he states that the Flavian generals hesitated, unsure what to do next. They realized that their troops were exhausted, and that launching an impromptu assault on the camp could prove disastrous. But their other options were less appealing. Withdrawal to Bedriacum would mean abandoning the field, and constructing a camp when the enemy was so close left them open to attack. Still, what terrified them most was their assessment of the soldiery’s temper. As they saw it, the troops were readier to endure danger than delay, hostile to what was safe but willing to take any risk, while their greed for plunder outweighed any concern about casualties.
Making a virtue of necessity, therefore, Antonius ordered the men to form a storming line around the enemy rampart. In the first exchanges of artillery fire, unsurprisingly, the Flavians suffered the heavier losses. But the situation did not improve when Antonius assigned specific sections of the ramparts and gates to specific units, probably as much to stop the troops’ getting in each other’s way as—in Tacitus’ words—to fire his legions with a spirit of competition. The troops took up positions in a concave arc facing westward. This time III Gallica and VII Galbiana were set on the left wing and attacked in the south; legions VII Claudia and VIII Augusta occupied the center, opposite the western side of the camp’s rampart; and “their own élan carried the men of XIII Gemina toward the gate to Brixia,” that is, on the Flavian right and the northern side of the rampart. There was a brief delay while the troops fossicked about in the fields for mattocks, picks, scythes, and ladders. Then they launched their assault in much the same way as the Vitellians had in their attack on Placentia, and with equally disastrous results. In fact, a fatal “hesitation would have set in, had not the generals at this juncture pointed out Cremona to troops by now exhausted and heedless of exhortations they believed idle.”
Whatever the generals meant by this gesture, the troops took it as a sign that one final assault on the camp would give them the right to sack Cremona too. This induced the attackers to redouble their efforts, and the bitterest fighting took place on the southern side of the camp. Here III Gallica and VII Galbiana, along with Antonius and the pick of the auxiliaries attacked simultaneously. Unable to beat them back, the Vitellians finally toppled a ballista on them. This caused widespread carnage, but it also brought down the battlements and the top of the rampart in its fall. Meanwhile, one of the wooden towers nearby collapsed under a shower of Flavian missiles, “and here, while the seventh struggled forward in wedge formation, the third broke through the camp-gate with their axes and swords.” This gave the attackers the breaches they needed, and all the sources agree—says Tacitus—that Gaius Volusius, a ranker from III Gallica, was the first to mount the rampart. As he hurled down those who resisted, he attracted everybody’s attention with his shouts that the camp was taken, and the other attackers poured in. The terrified Vitellians leapt from the rampart, attempting to find shelter in the city, but few made it. The open ground between the camp and Cremona was turned into a shambles.
Still, the Flavians found themselves confronted now with a truly formidable task. Cremona’s walls were tall and vertical (the rampart had sloped), the towers were of stone, and the gates were sheathed with iron. Besides, the enemy troops within gave no sign of yielding, the inhabitants were numerous and devoted to Vitellius, and the city was also filled with traders. An annual fair was in progress that had attracted people from all over northern Italy, and while they represented a source of plunder for the attackers, they could help defend the city too. As a first step, therefore, Antonius tried persuasion through property loss. He ordered his men to fire the most luxurious of the townhouses outside the walls, in the hope that members of the city council would be induced to change sides. And he ordered the boldest of his men to occupy any buildings close to and taller than the city walls. From there they were to dislodge the defenders with salvoes of roof tiles, rafters, and firebrands.
When the Flavian legions began to mass for an assault and the suppressing fire started up, the Vitellians’ morale began to crack. The rot set in among the officers, according to Tacitus. The higher their rank, the more they inclined to surrender, for fear that if Cremona too were destroyed, they would be the ones singled out for killing and plundering. The common sol
diers, by contrast, gave no thought to the future and, safer because of their lowly status, kept holding out, roaming the streets, and hiding in private houses. Tacitus’ assessment may be too cynical. The Vitellian soldiery were obviously determined to fight on no matter what, but this too should have terrified their officers, since it made a sack of the town inevitable. The officers could reasonably wonder whether it was worth the pain and suffering, when Caecina had already tried to betray them, and there was no sign that Valens would be arriving any time soon.
Whatever the case, desperation induced the leading officers to tear down the emblems of their allegiance to Vitellius, to set Caecina free, and to beg him to intercede with the Flavians. Puffed up with resentment, he refused. This, says Tacitus, was the ultimate evil: all these brave men were reduced to imploring in tears the assistance of a traitor. How long they spent in this futile endeavor he does not say, but there was some delay before they settled on an alternative and—like the people of Vienne when faced with Valens and his army—hung the tokens of surrender from the walls. Antonius at once ordered a cease-fire, but here Tacitus telescopes events significantly. There must in fact have been two sets of talks, the first with the Vitellian commanders, since their surrender was not unconditional, and the second with representatives of Cremona’s governing council, since the people emerged from the town as soon as terms were agreed. And as Cremona surrendered, there should have been no sack, no matter what the Flavian generals had meant by pointing to the town earlier, and no matter what their troops had taken this gesture to mean. But Tacitus leaves all this aside, to stress the pathos of the scene, and by paying tribute to the defenders’ courage to highlight Caecina’s shortcomings once again.
According to his account, the Vitellians now brought out their eagles and standards. A dejected column of unarmed soldiers followed, their eyes fixed on the ground. The victors had lined both sides of the road, and at first they hurled insults and shook their fists at their enemies. But when the vanquished suffered every indignity without defiance, the Flavians remembered that these were the men who had shown restraint in their victory at Bedriacum. So there was a revulsion of feeling—until Caecina appeared, in full official dress as consul and with the escort of lictors appropriate to his office. The Flavians’ anger flared up again, and they taunted him with his arrogance, his savagery (that is, his lack of consideration for the troops from whom he now marked himself off so conspicuously), and even his treachery, since they thought it no more laudable than did the Vitellians. Moving in quickly to prevent violence, Antonius gave Caecina a guard, and sent him off to Vespasian. Since this is the Vitellian commander’s final appearance in what remains of the Histories, it is to Josephus that we owe the information that Caecina “was well received by the emperor and covered up the shame of his perfidy with unanticipated honors.”
Meanwhile the common people of Cremona had emerged from the city, possibly to take the air after being cooped up for so long, possibly to check on the fate of missing Vitellian soldiers who had been their friends, and possibly because—like the inhabitants of Rome when Vitellius’ troops first approached the city—they never could resist a soldier. Initially their appearance provoked only some rough handling, and Antonius attempted to calm things down with a speech. In this he is said to have praised his troops extravagantly, to have spoken mercifully of the defeated Vitellians, and—to avoid inflaming his audience—to have tiptoed around the subject of Cremona. It was not enough, as Tacitus indicates in a dissection of the troops’ grievances. The men were determined to destroy the city because of their deep-seated greed for plunder, but over this they laid various pretexts. First, they nursed deep hostility toward the people of Cremona because, so they believed, the latter had assisted the Vitellians enthusiastically throughout the war between Otho and Vitellius. Second, the men of XIII Gemina had been taunted by the locals when they had been made to construct the amphitheater for Caecina’s gladiatorial show. Third, there was the behavior of the Cremonan womenfolk, who had taken food to the Vitellians during the night battle. This convicted the women—and perhaps their menfolk too, since they let them do it—of political partisanship. And then there was the last straw. The troops caught sight of some of the wealthy visitors who had come to Cremona for the fair, presumably among the local inhabitants who had ventured out of the city.
At this point Tacitus introduces an episode involving Antonius Primus that remains controversial to this day. Remarking that nobody paid any attention to the other Flavian generals, so that the spotlight fell on Antonius alone, he reports that the latter decided to betake himself to the baths in one of the villas outside the city. Though other explanations have been offered, it looks as if his primary concern was with appearances, to clean off the blood and gore, to change into civilian clothes, and then to return, so that the hostilities could be seen to be over. When he reached the baths, however, he found that they were not ready, and the only response he received to his complaint that the water was cold was an impudent “they’d be hot in just a minute.” An eavesdropper heard this remark, made almost certainly by a slave attached to the house, attributed it to Antonius, and so spread the story that he had given the signal to burn down Cremona (fires regularly accompanied a sack). And this, as Tacitus is careful to phrase it, brought down on Antonius the opprobium for the sack, even though Cremona was already in flames when the remark was made. During his absence, 40,000 armed men and a yet larger number of soldiers’ slaves and camp followers had poured into the city.
The sacking of Cremona was undoubtedly a horrific business, and there is no telling how many civilians were killed. But as it was hardly the first time Romans had inflicted such suffering on a city, Tacitus’ account is made up largely of conventional scenes in conventional phrasing. He was not trying to diminish the intensity of the suffering of young and old, male and female, rich and poor. This was how a Roman audience expected such events to be described, as is shown by Pliny the Younger’s use of similar tropes of the chaos in Pompeii when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79. Besides, Tacitus does indivualize this sack, once again by putting the onus on the soldiery. “As was to be expected of an army with different languages and different customs, since it was made up of Romans, provincials, and foreign tribesmen, their lusts were diverse and there was always somebody to think that what they were doing was acceptable. So for four days Cremona kept them occupied, and at the last, when all else lay in flames, only the temple of Mephitis still stood, outside the walls, protected perhaps by its position, perhaps by its deity.”
This final step in Tacitus’ attempt to explain the sack of the city has often been misunderstood. Of the various options open to him, it would have been easiest to blame on the Vitellians, as does Dio: “most of the wrongs were committed by the Vitellians, for they knew where the richest citizens lived and how to move around the city quickly. They showed no hesitation about killing those on whose behalf they had fought and they beat up and murdered their victims as if they themselves had been wronged.” But this interpretation was hardly plausible, if the bulk of these troops marched out of Cremona before the sack, as Tacitus reports and Dio does not. The other obvious option, adopted by Vespasian and his associates, was to make Antonius the scapegoat. (Vespasian certainly, and justifiably, refused to accept responsibility.) Yet even Josephus, the supposed mouthpiece for the new regime, did not follow this officially approved line. His account is highly compressed, and he may have run together the attacks on the camp and the city. But though he states that “Antonius turned his troops loose to plunder the town,” he also asserts that they forced their way into Cremona. In his view, therefore, they took the city by assault and so had every right to sack it, no matter how imprudent it may have been to do so.
In these circumstances, it is not surprising that Tacitus offered a different picture again, taken probably from the eyewitness account of Vipstanus Messalla. On this view, the Flavian soldiery were animated above all by greed for plunder, even though they fabricat
ed grievances to justify their conduct. To that extent they may have fueled the kind of vapid generalizations about brutal and licentious soldiery that Plutarch so adored. But as Tacitus’ narrative has also shown, the troops had made a two-day forced march from Verona; they had gone into battle the day they reached Bedriacum; they had fought through that night; and they had stormed the Vitellians’ camp the next day. If we judge by the evidence from other, better-documented sacks, the mixture of exhaustion and exhilaration the men felt when Cremona surrendered must have made them absolutely ungovernable. Yet none of this exculpated Antonius. For one thing, Romans believed that the character of an army mirrored that of its general. And for another, the commander in chief could not shrug off the ultimate responsibility if his troops went out of control. It remained a failure of leadership, and even his admirers could not view it in any other light.
10
End Game (November and December)
The second half of the campaign that led to the overthrow of Vitellius was marked by three disasters, two major and one minor. The halfhearted attempt by Vespasian’s brother, Flavius Sabinus, to carry out a coup in Rome when Vitellius attempted his half-baked abdication led to the destruction of the temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest on the Capitol, the most sacred shrine in the city. Then Vitellius’ brother Lucius sacked Tarracina, a small town to the south, when he wiped out a group of renegades acting allegedly on Vespasian’s behalf. Finally there was an assault on Rome, which culminated in the storming of the praetorian camp amid another welter of blood and gore. For what happened at Tarracina Lucius Vitellius had to bear the blame. For the two major mishaps Antonius Primus was apparently made the principal scapegoat, on the ground that if he had advanced more speedily, he could have saved Sabinus and averted the need for battles in Rome. Tacitus rejects this interpretation, but once again he does not defend Antonius’ conduct. He holds that nobody emerged—or could emerge—from these events creditably.