by Gwyn Morgan
In fact, events played into Antonius’ hands. By now legion XI Claudia had come up from Burnum in Dalmatia, and it brought with it a levy of 6,000 Dalmatian tribesmen. The legion had supported Otho in the spring, but had returned peaceably to its base the moment it heard of his suicide (wherever it was at the time). The men—says Tacitus—were worried because it looked as though they had held back until success was assured, and for this they had no excuse. Though their commander was the lackadaisical governor, the “rich old man” Pompeius Silvanus, real power rested with the legionary legate Annius Bassus, and he got his way—later rather than sooner—by humoring his superior and taking care of important questions. (He would receive a prompt reward, a suffect consulship, in 70.) And a use was found for the Dalmatians. Since at least some marines in the Ravenna fleet were clamoring for promotion to legionary status, Antonius incorporated the best of them into his column and filled the vacancies in the fleet with the Dalmatians. Tacitus leaves his readers to work out the implications, that though the other generals wanted to limit the size of Antonius’ force, he acquired extra troops from two groups of men eager to display their prowess, legionaries of XI Claudia who felt ashamed of not joining in sooner, and ex-marines set on proving that they deserved promotion to legionary status.
This may be why, when Antonius set off for the south, he was accompanied by the other generals. They made their first major halt at Fanum Fortunae, the town at the point where the Flaminian Way turned toward the Apennines. This gave everybody pause. Perhaps they were uncertain what to do next. They were no more familiar with this terrain than they had been with that of the Po Valley. Perhaps too the generals failed once again to agree on a course of action. According to Tacitus, they had heard a rumor that the praetorian cohorts were being brought up from Rome, and they fancied that the main pass through the mountains was already blocked by enemy pickets. He never states specifically that they reconnoitered the pass, but the ascent on the northern side was steep, the pass itself was a narrow gorge some 2,400 feet (730 m) above sea level and nearly a mile long, and it was now the second half of November.
This was not the only difficulty they faced. The neighborhood of Fanum Fortunae had been “devastated by war,” probably when the cohorts Valens summoned from Rome had encountered the marines led by Cornelius Fuscus. Supplies were short since winter was coming. And on top of this, the troops “terrified their generals” by demanding “nail money,” an allowance with which to buy new boots. Tacitus regards this as a pretext for greediness, but the men had marched some 210 miles at speed—and they did not get the money in any case. The generals had made no plans to procure cash or food during their advance, seemingly on the assumption that they would be able to live off the land. So out of a mixture of “haste and greediness,” everybody thought only of himself, and “what could have been had for the army as a whole was carried off as plunder by individuals.” This too looks like a valid example of an army out of control. But Tacitus is exaggerating. Why, after all, should we blame the men for fending for themselves when their generals had failed to consider their needs? And can we truly say that the men endangered the long-term prospects for success when, as usual, it was only their immediate needs they wanted satisfied? Besides, Tacitus is setting the scene for a story his audience would consider damning evidence of the column’s indifference to right and wrong. Many accounts, he asserts, report that an ordinary cavalryman came to the generals and demanded a reward for having killed his own brother in the last battle. The generals had no idea how to respond: ordinary morality forbade their granting his petition, but the needs of civil war ruled out punishment. So they put him off, claiming that he deserved more than they could possibly give him straightaway.
Although this is the end of the story as such, Tacitus goes on to remark, with an appropriate show of indignation, that this was not the first example of fratricide in a Roman civil war. Sisenna had reported that in the battle fought at the Janiculum in 87 B.C. a common soldier had killed his brother and then, out of remorse, committed suicide. Whether or not Tacitus believed his story does not matter, any more than does the question whether the cavalryman waited till now to make his request because he only plucked up his courage after others had demanded “nail money.” Two other aspects are more important. There is the obvious point that a Roman soldier asked to be rewarded for a shameful deed. And behind this lurks the point that the story reflected as badly on all the Flavian generals as it did on the cavalryman. Antonius was not alone in placing expediency above morality on this occasion. When Romans believed that the behavior of an army reflected the character of its generals, Antonius’ opponents could hardly claim—now or later—that they had seized the moral high ground.
Soon after this, the Flavian generals must have held another council of war, at which they came to two decisions. They would send their cavalry on ahead to scout the area south of Fanum Fortunae, in hopes of finding another, easier way through the Apennines (none existed). At the same time they would summon all their legions from Verona and arrange for the Ravenna fleet to bring convoys of supplies from the north. Once again, it should be clear, the procrastinators prevailed, offering a plan that presented only a show of action. The cavalry was to be limited to scouting passes through the mountains, and the rest of the force would sit on its hands and wait, not just for the supplies but also for the troops summoned from Verona. And the procrastinators prevailed because they could invoke Mucianus’ wishes too, this being where Tacitus sets his equivocal letters. And these letters must have made things more difficult for Antonius in another way too, if they showed that Mucianus was steadily overhauling the column. Besides this, Plotius Grypus and his cronies wrote to Vespasian, putting the worst construction on Antonius’ actions and praising Mucianus to the skies. This did Antonius no more good.
Antonius did not help his own case. As good a rabble-rouser as he was, opposition made him headstrong and pompous. He not only openly faulted Mucianus for devaluing the dangers he had undergone. More incautiously still, he sent Vespasian a dispatch that was “both too boastful to be addressed to an emperor and too critical of his main associate.” Tacitus gives us its purported gist, a thoroughly egocentric overview of the campaign. It was Antonius’ efforts that had galvanized the Pannonian legions and the commanders in Moesia; it was his determination that had led them to cross the Alps, to seize control of northern Italy, and to cut off Vitellius’ chances of drawing reinforcements from Germany and Raetia. That the Vitellian troops had been attacked while at odds with one another and dispersed, had been overwhelmed by a whirlwind of cavalry, and then routed by the main force of the legions in a battle lasting an entire day and night, these achievements were all his work. The misfortune Cremona had suffered was an accident of war, and much worse had happened in previous civil conflicts. Antonius was not waging war by letter; he was in the thick of things. He had no wish to belittle the glory won by those who had guaranteed the security of Moesia and beaten off the Dacians. His concern was the safety and security of Italy. And his efforts would be in vain if the glory went to those who had taken no part in the campaign. Mucianus soon heard of the contents of this letter, and the result, Tacitus adds, was a feud that Antonius cultivated openly, Mucianus more craftily and more implacably.
At this point Tacitus leaves Antonius twisting in the wind and turns to Vitellius’ countermeasures or lack thereof, partly no doubt to tease his readers into wondering how exactly the feud would play out. But it serves his narrative purposes too. From now on, his account alternates between the adversaries, to bring out the contemporaneity of the events occurring in the different theaters. So, of Vitellius, Tacitus declares that he refused to admit that his troops had been crushingly defeated at Cremona, and put off the remedies for his ills rather than the ills themselves. Had he listened to others, he would have realized that he had the forces to make a fight of it. As he pretended that all was well, his condition grew steadily worse. In his own presence nobody spoke out, and gossip
was forbidden elsewhere in the city. So “there was even more talk, and those who might have told the truth if allowed, spread much more appalling rumors because it was forbidden.” The Flavian generals aggravated the situation. Vitellian scouts sent to check on the enemy’s progress were captured by the Flavians, but instead of killing them, the Flavians gave them a guided tour of the victorious army and then sent them back to Rome.
Vitellius, says Tacitus, interrogated these scouts in private and then ordered them executed. Some doubt the veracity of this statement, but unless something of the sort was happening, there would be little point in the story of a centurion named Julius Agrestis. No mere ranker, he tried to goad Vitellius into action in numerous conversations (a comment perhaps indicating that the luckless scouts had been numerous too). Then he induced the emperor to send him out to look things over. With remarkable bravery, or effrontery, he went straight to Antonius and informed him why he had come. So the general let him see for himself what had happened at Cremona and what had been done with the defeated legions. When Agrestis returned to Vitellius and the latter refused to believe him, the centurion won his place in history. “Since you need compelling proof,” he declared, “and I am no more use to you alive or dead, I will force you to believe me.” Quitting the imperial presence, he killed himself, and this finally broke through the wall of Vitellius’ resistance.3
As if roused from sleep, Vitellius ordered his praetorian prefects, Julius Priscus and Alfenus Varus, to take 14 cohorts of the guard and all the cavalry squadrons up the Flaminian Way, and to block the passes through the Apennines. They were accompanied, Tacitus adds, by “a legion of marines” from the Misene fleet. As Vitellius could not have produced this legion out of thin air, it has been held that he must have been making more preparations than Tacitus allows. But Tacitus terms them specifically “all picked men,” and that should count for something, even if he does so only to add that “had they been entrusted to any other general, they would have been fully capable of taking the offensive.” In numbers at any rate it was a powerful force; 19,000 or so strong. The rest of his troops Vitellius held back to guard the city, entrusting them to his brother Lucius. So Lucius took command of the two remaining praetorian cohorts and all the auxiliary cohorts still in the city (of which there could have been up to 30). But he would not have taken over the four urban cohorts, since they belonged to Flavius Sabinus, the prefect of the city, and there was no point in angering him. No account appears to have been taken of the seven cohorts of the watch. And an imperial troupe of several hundred gladiators was entrusted to a disreputable specimen named Claudius Julianus. Even so, Lucius’ force may have been nearly as large as the one Aulus sent to the north.
Having parceled out responsibilities like this, Vitellius made no adjustments to his own lifestyle. But since he was still unsure whether everything was under control, he decided to court the favor of other elements in the population. To win over members of the governing class, he hurried on the elections at which consuls were designated for perhaps ten years to come.4 And like Otho in a similar predicament, he issued edicts raising the political status of cities and communities inside and outside Italy, remitting tribute in some cases and in others granting autonomy. “In short, he inflicted severe wounds on the body politic with no regard for the future.” The common people gawked at the magnitude of the favors he conferred, but they were “favors for which the stupid paid cash down, whereas the sensible thought them worthless, since they could be neither granted nor accepted without harm to the state.”
At length, probably around the end of November, Vitellius yielded to the importunities of his expeditionary force and traveled north to join it. For the moment, Tacitus makes nothing of the fact that this army had marched only some 72 miles up the Flaminian Way and had halted at Mevania (Bevagna), on open ground about 5 miles short of the point where the road emerged from the foothills of the Apennines. But he dwells on Vitellius’ being accompanied by a long train of senators, many eager to win his favor, but more motivated by fear. Uncertain in purpose and an easy prey to unreliable advice, Vitellius was also assailed by a burst of prodigies, the first Tacitus has mentioned in this entire campaign and—more surprisingly perhaps—a batch Suetonius omits. For a start, Vitellius was addressing the troops one day, when so huge a flock of “ill-omened birds” flew over that they shut out the daylight like a black cloud. Dio, more dramatically, declares them a flock of vultures that nearly knocked him off the rostrum. Then a bull selected for sacrifice, to assure success in the campaign, escaped from the altar and was struck down some distance away and not in the proper manner. But, says Tacitus, resorting to one of his rhetorical tricks, the most striking portent was Vitellius. With no idea of what active service entailed and no plan to offer, he kept asking about orders of march, how to scout, and whether they should speed up or slow down operations.
As Vitellius was unable to focus on any one matter for any length of time, each new piece of intelligence caused him “to show his anxiety in both his looks and his gait.” So he took to drinking. This did not insulate him either. For next news arrived that the fleet at Misenum had defected to Vespasian, and so he returned to Rome, “unnerved by each new setback and blind to where the real danger lay.” It is now that Tacitus comments on the lack of progress made by the army and the indecisiveness of its leader. While Vitellius could have crossed the Apennines with a strong force of fresh troops and have attacked an enemy suffering severely from cold and want of supplies, he decided instead to split his forces (one group to check Antonius’ offensive and one to deal with the revolt in Misenum), and to abandon his best troops, men determined to fight to the last, to be killed or captured by the enemy. The most experienced centurions would have told him this, had they been asked, so Tacitus declares. “But the courtiers kept them at arm’s length, having trained their ruler to find the truth unpalatable and only what would hurt him pleasant.”
Yet the defection of the Misene fleet was not something that could have been foreseen, whether or not it was triggered by Vitellius’ departure for the north, or by his skimming off the most enthusiastic marines for his “legion.” The uproar began with Claudius Faventinus, a centurion dishonorably discharged by Galba. He showed up in Misenum with a forged letter from Vespasian, offering the marines a donative if they deserted. Faventinus was apparently a freelance, interested only in finding his way back into the service, but no steps were taken against him by the fleet’s commander, Claudius Apollinaris, “neither firm in loyalty nor energetic in treachery.” So the ongoing uproar attracted another opportunist, the ex-praetor Apinius Tiro who happened to be in the nearby town of Minturnae. Apollinaris and Tiro now elbowed Faventinus aside (we hear no more of him) and made common cause against Vitellius. They also encouraged neighboring towns to join in, and this spread the unrest further, because local rivalries surfaced immediately. When Puteoli (Pozzuoli) declared for Vespasian, says Tacitus, Capua promptly announced for Vitellius.
The emperor’s initial response, made at Mevania, was to dispatch a third Claudius, Julianus, to deal with the situation. He had preceded Apollinaris in command of the fleet, and was known to the marines as a lax disciplinarian, the kind of unthreatening figure who might just win them back. Still, he was given the imperial troupe of gladiators under his command and one of the four urban cohorts to back him up, these forces being sent—like himself—from Rome, no doubt because it was nearer to the source of the trouble. But Julianus showed no greater eagerness to take a hard line now than he had earlier. So, after a show of offering battle, he too switched sides, and the three men occupied Tarracina, a town on the Appian Way some 65 miles south of Rome and about the same distance north of Misenum. This lay on the coast in what Roman aristocrats had long viewed as a resort area. As Suetonius tells us, Galba had been born in a villa on a hill overlooking the town, “on the left-hand side as you make your way (south) to Formiae.”
Since Tacitus asserts that Tarracina was ”better protected by
its walls and its natural position than by its new garrison,” Vitellius took the town’s seizure more seriously than he need have done. Perhaps he was worried by the prospect of a rogue fleet interfering with the grain ships bringing supplies of food to Rome. Or, like Nero, he could have been taking precautions against the day when he might have to flee Italy by sea (the legionary legate in Africa, Valerius Festus, was his kinsman, after all). Whatever the case, once Vitellius was back in Rome, he decided to split his forces three ways. Again Tacitus alludes only elliptically to this redistribution, but it came to this. When Vitellius quitted Mevania for Rome, he took 7 of the 14 praetorian cohorts with him, compensating for this by allowing the forces under the prefects to fall back 35 miles to Narnia (Narni), a much stronger position. Perched on a hilltop, the town commanded the imposing bridge on which the Flaminian Way crossed the River Nar (Neri), and the Flavians would have taken enormous casualties trying to force it. Of the 7 cohorts Vitellius took with him, he kept 1 to serve—along with the 2 still in Rome—as his personal guard. The other 6, with 500 cavalry, he assigned to his brother Lucius, and ordered him to quell the unrest in the south.
This three-way split was a bad idea, but not perhaps in quite the way it is usually said to have been. Tacitus himself clearly thought that the emperor left inadequate forces in the north, and his verdict has been widely endorsed. From a military point of view, however, it is belied by the caution and the respect with which Antonius treated this force. Seven praetorian cohorts held up his advance for a week or more, and when they surrendered because their officers were deserting in droves, it was on honorable terms. There was never a battle, even after the Flavian legions came up. True, it is impossible to tell how much longer the cohorts could have held out, but what Antonius won was a political victory. This is not all. It can be argued that Vitellius’ decision to send Lucius south was far more significant. This deprived the emperor of the services of the one man who might have given him some backbone, and so have averted his attempts to abdicate and the bloodshed they occasioned. As Tacitus remarks later, Lucius was the one Vitellian general left who could have defended Rome effectively. And if he had held the city with 9 praetorian cohorts, he would have made the final battle into a much bloodier affair.