by Gwyn Morgan
Vitellius was not so foolish as to think his dispositions an ideal solution to his problems, but his spirits were raised at first by the genuine enthusiasm of his praetorians and by “the clamor of the people, demanding that he arm them as well.” Though his prominent friends had made themselves scarce (the higher their rank, the more disloyal they were), the emperor’s freedmen urged him to take the people up on their offer. When he did, the turnout was enormous. At first the emperor registered the volunteers’ names personally, but eventually he had to hand the task over to the consuls, Caecilius Simplex and Quinctius Atticus. Meanwhile he demanded contributions of money and slaves from the senators. The knights spontaneously offered their services and their cash. And this led even the nonimperial freedmen to volunteer their resources, at first from fear, but then with genuine enthusiasm as they caught the mood of the moment. Then Tacitus undercuts the positive effect of all this:
It was not so much Vitellius for whom many felt compassion as for the level to which the principate had sunk. Not that he failed to elicit sympathy by his expression, his remarks and his tears. He was generous with his promises and—as the fearful tend to be—immoderate in his behavior. Why he even wanted to take the title “Caesar.” … But just as everything that is started on a thoughtless impulse eventually loses way, so the senators and knights began to slip away, at first hesitantly and when he was not present, but later with open contempt and without concern, until Vitellius grew ashamed of his vain efforts and forgave them what they would not give him.
This is an odd piece of writing, but there is no need to invoke malice or Flavian propaganda. Nor is it helpful to turn the material on its head, so as to produce a favorable picture of Vitellius. Though Tacitus makes nothing of the emperor’s being able to rally the people as Nero had not, he will report later that they actually marched out to offer battle. Nor does he undercut the people’s enthusiasm, as does Suetonius. The biographer claims that the people enrolled so enthusiastically because Vitellius “promised to release them from service the moment victory was won and to pay them the bounties given to veterans after they had served their full term.” Had this been so, Tacitus would never have omitted it.5 What justifies Tacitus’ version of events is practicality. The common people lacked military experience, since there had been no citizen militia for over a century, and an effective force could not be manufactured overnight. And even a trained force needed leaders, and there were none to be had. The emperor’s friends had made themselves scarce, and his freedmen urged him on only because they stood to lose most from a change of regime.
Antonius and his forces meanwhile were much heartened by what they considered Vitellius’ cowardly withdrawal from Mevania. The peoples south of the Apennines were likewise encouraged to change sides, a development that promised to ease the supply difficulties Antonius’ men were having. And the troops must have known too that their own legions were now close enough to permit an advance. So Antonius and the other generals began making their way through the mountains. Though battered by a severe winter storm, they were unmolested by the enemy (as Tacitus sees it, another proof that luck was as important to the Flavians as the leadership of their generals). And in this trek they met up with Quintus Petillius Cerialis, “a kinsman of Vespasian and a distinguished soldier.” What actually distinguished Cerialis’ soldiering—as Tacitus remarks frequently elsewhere—was its rashness: as legionary legate of IX Hispana in Britain in 61, he had let his troops be routed by Boudicca’s rebels. But as Antonius favored risk takers, this as much as his kinship with Vespasian may have led to Cerialis’ being made one of the leaders of the column.
Cerialis had escaped from Rome, whatever he had been doing there, by disguising himself as a peasant, and had used his knowledge of the area to get through the Vitellian lines. His escape from Rome may also have been what prompted the generals to communicate with Flavius Sabinus, the prefect of the city, and with Vespasian’s 18-year-old son Domitian. Although Tacitus disagrees with the “many authors” who asserted that these two could easily have escaped from Rome, he allows that Antonius’ messengers made contact with them. Sabinus, however, kept using as his excuse “ill-health that would not permit exertion or bold action,” while “Domitian had the courage, but though the guards set over him by Vitellius promised to accompany him in his flight, it was feared that they were trying to trap him.” Neither Sabinus nor Domitian emerges creditably from this episode. The older man is presented as a buffoon, the younger as too suspicious. But given Tacitus’ hostility to Domitian, it is noteworthy that the historian refrains from specifying by whom “it was feared” that the young man’s guards were trying to trap him.
The Flavian generals made their next halt at Carsulae (Casigliano), so far as we can tell early in the second week of December. Ten miles north of the Vitellians’ position at Narnia, Carsulae gave them a panoramic view of the countryside to the south, and this was a useful safeguard against surprise attacks by enemy cavalry. In this arm the Vitellians seem to have been much stronger, and they even sent a force of 400 horse to occupy a town five miles to the west of their position, Interamna (Terni, the site of Cornelius Dolabella’s murder). For the Flavians, nonetheless, supplies were easy to procure, since there were now any number of flourishing towns in their rear. Besides, the column needed a few days to rest, and the generals used this break to allow their legions at last to catch up with them. The generals also contemplated parleys with the Vitellian forces, in hopes of inducing them to desert, but their troops were much less keen on this idea. As before Cremona, the men wanted a military victory that would enable them to loot to their hearts’ content. They were reluctant even to wait for their own legions, potentially “allies in plunder rather than in peril.”
This led Antonius to call an assembly and deliver a speech in which he laid out his plans. In this speech he seems to know more about events south of Rome than he should have done, but perhaps Cerialis brought him up to date. Vitellius, so Antonius supposedly declared, still had troops enough to warrant being taken seriously. If his men were given a chance to reflect on their situation, they would waver in their allegiance, but they would fight desperately if pressed. When people started a civil war, they had to trust to luck. Winning the war demanded planning and calculation. As things stood, now that the Misene fleet and many cities on the Campanian coast had deserted Vitellius, he controlled only a narrow band of territory between Tarracina and Narnia. They themselves had won ample glory by their victory at Cremona, and incurred too much unpopularity by sacking the city. They had to give up any idea of storming Rome. They would win larger rewards and the greatest glory if they did everything they could to preserve the senate and people of Rome without bloodshed.
Whether or not these are the views Antonius claimed to have expressed later, after he was made responsible for the assault on Rome, he was able to calm the men, and they waited for their legions. Once they were reinforced, the loyalty of the Vitellian forces in Narnia began to flag. None of the officers urged them to fight, says Tacitus. On the contrary, many took their units over to the enemy, “as a gift for the victors and insurance for their own futures.” From the deserters the Flavians learnt of the Vitellian outpost at Interamna, and sent Arrius Varus to crush it. The majority of the cavalrymen surrendered without a fight, and the handful who escaped only increased the panic in Narnia. So more and more officers deserted, until the prefects, Julius Priscus and Alfenus Varus, gave up and left for Rome, “thus freeing all alike from the shame of treachery.” Yet the praetorian rankers remained steadfastly loyal to their emperor, still convinced that Valens had made his way to the Rhine frontier and was raising a new army. This decided Antonius to order Valens’ execution. So he was brought up from the nearby town of Urvinum Hortense (Collemancio) and executed, so that his head could be displayed to his former troops. It was in its way a tribute to the prowess and reputation of these praetorians that such ruthlessness was used. For that reason too they were allowed to surrender formally
, and to march out of Narnia under their eagles and standards, on or around 15 December.
The prisoners were ordered to encamp, some of them at Narnia, and some at Interamna, both groups under the eyes of Flavian troops whose “task was not to threaten them if they remained quiet, but who were strong enough to quash any defiance.” Meanwhile Antonius pressed ahead with attempts to persuade Vitellius to surrender, sending off messages that offered him his life, a substantial sum of money (Suetonius mentions 100 million sesterces), and a retirement villa in Campania, if he laid down his arms and entrusted himself and his children to Vespasian. Since Mucianus wrote letters in the same vein, Vitellius inclined to trust these undertakings, and raised queries only about the number of slaves he would be allowed to keep, and where exactly on the coastline his retirement villa would be situated. “So great a torpor had overtaken him,” says Tacitus in one of his best-known epigrams, “that if everybody else had not remembered that he was emperor, he himself would have forgotten it.”
This verdict is unfair. Dio’s epitomator insists that Vitellius at this time was changing his mind constantly, “driven this way and that like a ship in a storm.” Though he substantiates his claim only with vague generalizations, it was now probably that Vitellius had one more distraction to deal with, the death of his mother Sextilia. Tacitus tends to harp on Sextilia’s feeling that Vitellius had never come up to her expectations, but he says nothing about the emperor’s attitude to her. It may be unwise to assume that he lacked affection for her, even though he had treated her shamefully in the past. Suetonius, however, tells two bizarre stories to suggest the opposite. In one, the emperor’s German prophetess predicted that his rule could be set on a lasting foundation only if he outlived Sextilia, and so he starved her to death. In the other, marginally more plausible, Sextilia asked her son for poison, and he gave it to her, because she wanted to end her life “out of distaste for the current situation and fear for the future.”
Whatever the circumstances of her death, it must have looked at this stage as if Antonius would win the game, by reaching an agreement with Vitellius and forestalling Mucianus’ attempts to appropriate the glory. And so he might have, had not another player decided to take a hand. Aware of the dickering between Vitellius, Antonius, and Mucianus that went on from the first week of December, leading senators in Rome began approaching Sabinus, the prefect of the city, and urging him to seize his share in the victory and the glory. In private talks with him, says Tacitus, they pointed out that he could rely on his own troops, the urban cohorts, he could rally the seven cohorts of the watch, and he could use their slaves too. Fortune was on their side, and he should not let Antonius grab all the glory. Vitellius was backed by only a few cohorts of praetorians, whose morale had been sapped by the bad news coming in from every side. The common people were fickle and, once they were given a strong lead, they would heap on Vespasian the flattery they had paid to Vitellius. And the emperor himself was no obstacle; scarcely up to handling things when they were going well, he was crippled now. The glory of ending the war would go to the man who took control of Rome. It behooved Sabinus to reserve the throne for Vespasian, just as it behooved Vespasian to rank his brother above all others.
Tacitus says nothing to indicate that the rhetoric of these conversations was far superior to the accuracy of the claims they contained. For a start, Sabinus had only three urban cohorts under his command (the fourth was with Apinius Tiro somewhere south of Rome), and these cohorts had supposedly been filled up with Vitellians when the emperor overhauled the praetorian guard.6 Again, the cohorts of the watch were a paramilitary force, called out only in the direst emergencies and only as backup. And arming slaves, no matter whose they were or for what purpose, was very dangerous, since it excited adverse comment about servile wars. Then too, Vitellius might have only three cohorts of praetorians with him in Rome, but there was no hint that they would accept a change of regime, no matter what had happened at Narnia. And the people’s fickleness was irrelevant. Militarily they possessed no more than nuisance value.
Instead of belaboring the obvious, Tacitus focuses on Sabinus’ lack of enthusiasm for these calls to action. The prefect was incapacitated by age, being somewhere between 60 and 65 years old. The uncharitable, Tacitus continues, surmised that Sabinus was also jealous of his brother and reluctant to yield first place to him in the family hierarchy, and so that while there was a semblance of harmony between them, the brothers disliked one another at heart. But, he adds, “a better interpretation” would be that Sabinus was a gentle soul, predisposed to negotiate because he shrank from bloodshed. This is no sudden onset of benevolence on Tacitus’ part, since he is not praising Sabinus. Aristocrats put in command of troops were not supposed to be gentle souls. Tacitus’ thesis is that Sabinus was an aging, indecisive character whose best course would have been to remain neutral, the course to which he had hewed before and after his brother’s proclamation as emperor in July.
Yet Sabinus decided to inject himself into the negotiations and held several meetings with Vitellius. In these they discussed the terms on which the emperor would lay down arms. The earlier sessions were held in private, but their last meeting took place in the temple of Apollo next to the palace on the Palatine Hill, presumably because it qualified as both neutral and sacred ground. Nobody ever discovered what agreement they reached or if they reached one. For this Tacitus provides one reason explicitly: there were only two witnesses, the peace-loving ex-governor Cluvius Rufus, and Silius Italicus, an ex-consul and close friend of the emperor, best known today for his turgid epic poem on the Hannibalic War. Everybody else was kept at a distance and—like Kremlin watchers during the Cold War—had to draw conclusions from the gestures and facial expressions of the principals: “Vitellius seemed dejected and humbled, Sabinus not triumphant but closer to compassionate.” But there may have been another reason too. Tacitus does not state specifically that this last meeting was meant to be their final get-together, and since he implies later that Sabinus was caught off guard by Vitellius’ formal announcement of his wish to abdicate, the two men may have agreed only on terms, not on a timetable.
Whatever happened in this meeting, it must have been obvious that any agreement would require Vitellius to abdicate, and it is on this basis that Tacitus turns to the ways in which the emperor’s followers, the praetorians especially, reacted to news of the discussions. Then he provides the details on what, so he says, was the emperor’s single attempt to go through with the abdication on 18 December. And he presents this as the result, not of the discussions, but of Vitellius’ learning that his forces at Narnia had surrendered. Suetonius, however, attributes the abdication to Sabinus’ efforts and has Vitellius make three attempts to go through with it, the second and third of them splitting between them the details reported by Tacitus. Hence it is regularly claimed that Tacitus boiled down three attempts to one for artistic reasons, and that Suetonius would never have inflated one into three, when the hallmark of his account is extreme brevity. Two important points have been overlooked, however. First, it is all but certain, on chronological grounds, that Suetonius carved into two the attempt at abdication recorded by Tacitus. Second, while Suetonius rightly separated off the first attempt, this was only a tentative and unofficial testing of the waters on 17 December. It was tentative because, as Suetonius says, Vitellius made an informal speech to the one cohort of the guard on duty at the palace, and it was unofficial because he made it during the evening. What is more, this timing supports the idea that it was Vitellius’ reaction to the news from Narnia, not a response to his meetings with Sabinus. If Tacitus is guilty of anything, it is of omitting a relatively unimportant preliminary, even if that helped spread the news, intensified the hostility with which the praetorians viewed Vitellius’ plan to give up power, and caught Sabinus unawares.
In passing immediately to the initial reactions of Vitellius’ partisans to this plan, Tacitus is able for a start to award Vitellius his due meed of blame: �
�if the emperor could have changed the minds of his followers as easily as he changed his own, Vespasian’s army would have entered Rome without bloodshed.” Then he can launch into the angry, if predictable, rhetoric of Vitellius’ supporters. This came down to assertions that abdication would involve danger and disgrace, since everything would depend on the victor’s whims. Neither Vespasian in victory nor Vitellius’ followers in defeat would be able to endure his living on in retirement. And neither Vespasian, nor his friends, nor even his armies would have peace of mind so long as Vitellius’ six-year-old son lived. When the Flavians had butchered Valens, Primus and Mucianus (“that template for Flavian policy”) would be bound to execute the boy. Vitellius had to prove himself worthy of his ancestry and fight on, if only out of desperation. His troops were still loyal, the people were with him, and no worse fate awaited them than the one they faced. They must die whether they fought or surrendered, and death with honor was better than being slaughtered in disgrace.
Vitellius, however, was overwhelmed by self-pity, and by anxiety that continued fighting would lead to harsh treatment for his wife and children. So he called a public meeting on the morning of 18 December, and came down to the Forum in mourning dress. His household accompanied him, as dejected as he, and his son was carried in a litter “as if on the way to a funeral.” The people’s comments were ingratiating but untimely, the troops kept a menacing silence. But no person of discernment (no aristocrat in other words), once confronted with this sight, could remain unmoved by the spectacle. Here was the emperor of Rome, until yesterday the master of the world, abandoning his palace, his powers, and his city. Never had they seen the like, never had they heard of the like. Now, in a meeting he himself had called, surrounded by his own soldiers, “while even women looked on,” Vitellius announced that he was giving up the throne for the sake of peace and the state, and asked his listeners only that they remember him well and show sympathy for his brother, his wife, and his innocent children. Finally, when tears overcame him, he tried to hand his dagger to Caecilius Simplex, as if giving up the symbol of his office. But the consul refused to take it, and so did every other person of consequence to whom he offered it. So he left the rostrum, intending to place the dagger in the temple of Concord and to make his way to his brother’s house. But this time the crowd not only remonstrated energetically, they also blocked every other exit from the Forum, and so forced him to return to the palace.