69 AD: The Year of Four Emperors

by Gwyn Morgan

  Tacitus obviously devoted all his literary skills to the delineation of this scene, and rightly so. In a constitutional monarchy abdication is not a problem, no matter how sentimental or sordid the motives of the parties involved. With an emperor the situation was different, one reason why Augustus supposedly contemplated abdicating but dropped the idea at once as far too dangerous. There may be details that reflect poorly on Vitellius, for example, his having neither the presence nor the will to force his way through the crowd. But in no sense is this account mean-spirited, as is Suetonius’ version (the latter finds nothing to pity in the affair). Moreover, the care Tacitus lavished on the literary aspects of this episode hardly proves his account less accurate than Suetonius’. The latter, in essence, assigns the first half of the scene to Vitellius’ second attempt to lay down his powers, adding only that the emperor delivered his speech from a script. The handing off of the dagger and what follows from that he apportions to the third attempt, and he assigns this to a meeting called after the fall of the Capitol and Sabinus’ death. But it is highly unlikely that Caecilius Simplex or any other senior official was still around then to decline the dagger.

  Whatever the truth, Tacitus’ account continues as if Sabinus was unprepared for Vitellius’ announcement, or had not considered likely reactions to it, or again had concluded that his own presence in the Forum would seem inappropriate as well as inflammatory. At the time of the announcement he was certainly in his own house on the Quirinal Hill. So, “once the rumor that Vitellius was abdicating had begun to spread and Sabinus [in consequence] had sent instructions to the tribunes of the cohorts to keep their troops in check, the leading members of the senate, many members of the equestrian order, and all the men from the urban cohorts and the cohorts of the watch flocked to Sabinus’ house, as if the entire state had dropped into Vespasian’s lap.” Then the news arrived that the people remained devoted to the emperor, and that the praetorian cohorts were refusing to take orders from anybody else. Sabinus having gone too far to pull back, the others present urged him to resort to force, for fear that otherwise Vitellius’ followers would catch up with them “before they had organized and gathered their strength.” But Sabinus continued to procrastinate, “and as happens in situations of this kind, everybody offered advice, few faced up to the danger.”

  This last comment is Tacitus’ way of preparing for the next scene, still on 18 December. Sabinus must have been persuaded eventually that his best move was to make his way down to the Forum, to issue some kind of proclamation on Vespasian’s behalf, or else up the Palatine Hill, to get Vitellius to quit the palace (Dio’s account hints at this). He took an armed guard with him, of unknown size, and as his party was nearing the Forum, they ran into a group of determined Vitellians. Since the encounter was unexpected, only a skirmish followed, but the Vitellians won it. Panicked, Sabinus took the action that “looked safest in light of his predicament,” and seized the peak of the Capitol with a mixture of soldiers, senators, and knights. It is not easy, says Tacitus dryly, to give the names of the prominent men who accompanied him, since so many claimed to have risked their lives for the Flavian cause once Vespasian had won. And perhaps to deride these men, he adds that some aristocratic women underwent the siege too, the best known of them Verulana Gratilla, “who had the claims of neither children nor relatives to attract her, only her love of danger.” It is not the kind of tribute paid to a Roman woman in normal circumstances, but these were not normal circumstances and Verulana was daring, something Tacitus will not say of the one prominent man he names later, the consul Quinctius Atticus.

  What Sabinus hoped to achieve by occupying the Capitol, and how long he expected to hold out are questions we cannot answer, and Sabinus may not have been able to either. But Tacitus reports that since the Vitellian soldiery at first threw only a loose cordon round the hill, Sabinus was able not only to summon his own children and his nephew Domitian to join him an hour or so before midnight (18/19 December), but also to get a message out to Antonius, to the effect that he was under siege and needed help. Tacitus seems to have regarded this as an illustration of Sabinus’ incompetence and vainglory, since he adds that the rest of the night was so quiet that he could have slipped away easily. Bold as the Vitellian troops might be when facing danger, they had little taste for boring work like guard duty, and besides a sudden rainstorm made it difficult for them to see or hear anything.

  The Capitol and Its Environs

  At dawn on the next day (19 December) Sabinus decided to send a message to Vitellius before hostilities could start. His emissary was the senior centurion Cornelius Martialis, and he was instructed to present Sabinus as the injured innocent. Hence Tacitus gives him a message that is both highly disingenuous and openly threatening. Vitellius, he was to say, had made only a pretense of abdicating, this to deceive all the illustrious men who had rallied to Sabinus. Why after leaving the Forum had he not made for the family home on the Aventine? That would have been the conduct of a citizen determined to shun any claim to the throne. Instead, Vitellius had returned to the palace. From there an armed column had issued forth and had strewn one of the most crowded parts of the city with the corpses of innocent victims. And now not even the Capitol was being spared. Sabinus himself, as everyone knew, was a civilian and just one senator among many. Ever since the war between Vitellius and Vespasian had broken out, he had remained loyal to the emperor, even though Vespasian was his brother and was winning that war. It was Vitellius who had invited Sabinus to discuss terms for a surrender, terms that had value only for the vanquished. If Vitellius regretted the arrangements they had made, he would gain nothing by slaughtering an old man and a young boy. It was the enemy legions he should confront. That battle would decide the outcome.

  Vitellius made only a brief reply in which he offered excuses for his conduct and placed blame on the zeal of troops he could not restrain. “Unable to issue orders or prohibitions, he was not now an emperor, only the cause for a war.” Hence Martialis had hardly returned before a swarm of Vitellians launched a furious attack. Suetonius has no qualms about asserting not only that Vitellius had arranged the original attack on Sabinus, but that he ordered this assault as well, and watched the results from a dining room in the palace. This is spiteful rubbish, and there is no reason to prefer it to Tacitus’ report that the Vitellians acted off their own bat. Charging through the Forum, they marched in column up the hill by way of the Clivus Capitolinus, till they reached the outer gates, that is, the gates in the wall that marked off the precinct in which the Temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest stood. In the old days, says Tacitus, there were porticos on the right-hand side of the road as you made your way up, and the defenders climbed out onto their roofs and began hurling tiles and rocks down on the attackers. As the Vitellians were armed only with swords and were too impatient to bring up artillery, they threw torches into one of the porticos and followed the flames. And they would have broken through the gates once these had caught fire, had not Sabinus made an impromptu barricade by tearing down the statues on every side, “the glorious memorials of our ancestors.”

  Thwarted, the Vitellians tried a two-pronged attack. One group moved round to the southwestern corner of the hill, where the “One Hundred Steps” were situated, while the other moved slightly north of the Clivus Capitolinus, and began an attack by way of the saddle between the Capitol’s two peaks, an area known as the Asylum. “Both attacks were unexpected, but the one that began to develop through the Asylum was closer and more energetic.” Here the attackers could not be halted, because they climbed up through the adjoining apartment buildings that, thanks to a long period of peace, had been allowed to rise so high that their roofs were level with the ground of the Capitol. Hence, says Tacitus with far more restraint than our other sources show, “it is uncertain whether the attackers threw firebrands into these buildings, or if it was the defenders (this is the commoner story) as they tried to dislodge those of the enemy who were climbing up and had reach
ed the top.” In either case, the fire spread from these buildings to the porticos attached to the temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest, and because the temple’s “eagles,” the gables or the pediments that supported the roof, were of ancient wood, they caught fire and the temple burned to the ground, “its doors closed, undefended, and unplundered.”

  At this point Tacitus halts to deplore the destruction of what was regarded as “the guarantee” of Rome’s rule over the world—and not only by Romans. It was news of this disaster that spread Civilis’ revolt to the Gallic tribes nearest the Rhine, since the tribesmen too believed that the end of the Capitol meant the end of Rome’s empire. In the city the question of the responsibility for the fire was long to be a burning issue, and most of our sources take the easy way out. Two of them insist that the Vitellians burned down the temple (the Elder Pliny and Suetonius), and two more that they plundered it as well (Dio and Josephus). Likewise the restoration of the temple was one of the first subjects on the senate’s agenda the moment Vitellius was dead. Tacitus ignores all this. Instead, he uses the destruction of the temple to justify his original claim that the consulship of Galba and Vinius was nearly the last year of Rome’s existence. Conceding that this was not the first time the temple had been burnt down in a civil war, he distinguishes clearly—if speciously—between these conflagrations. The fire of July 83 B.C., he declares, was the work of an individual arsonist, a supporter of neither Sulla nor his Marian opponents. But the fire of 69 was a direct result of the crazed ambitions of emperors. Here Tacitus’ rhetoric runs away with him. The entire passage is overdone, from the initial claim that Rome was fighting no foreign enemies at the time (his own survey of the empire has disproved that), to his failure to admit at the close that the replacement temple would last only ten years. (It burned down in an accident in 80.)

  The fire frightened the defenders far more than the attackers. The Vitellians lacked neither skill nor determination, but the Flavian troops were panicky and their commander sluggish. At first, as if paralyzed mentally, Sabinus could not speak and he would not listen. Even when he pulled himself together, he countermanded orders he had just issued, and he ordered moves he had just forbidden. So, says Tacitus, everybody gave orders and nobody obeyed them, until at last the defenders began to throw away their arms and look for ways to escape. Once the Vitellians broke in, there was total chaos. A few military men of middling rank resisted bravely and were cut down, among them Cornelius Martialis, Sabinus’ emissary to Vitellius earlier, and Aemilius Pacensis, once one of the commanders of Otho’s maritime expedition. The Vitellians rounded up two of the most prominent men without difficulty, Sabinus himself, unarmed and rooted to the spot, and the consul Quinctius Atticus, who was a particular target because he had tossed leaflets from the hill in which he heaped praise on Vespasian and insults on Vitellius. Dio declares that Caecilius Simplex, the other consul, was present too. This is not unlikely, but if so, he must have been one of the men of rank who managed to escape. Some disguised themselves as slaves. Others slipped away and were smuggled out of the city hidden in the baggage of their clients. Still others, having overheard the Vitellians’ password, got away by giving it to the enemy troops or even demanding it from them.

  This said, Tacitus devotes a segment of narrative specifically to Domitian, Sabinus, and Quinctius Atticus, to bring out the three very different fates that awaited them. When the Vitellians broke in, Domitian hid in the quarters of the warden of Jupiter’s temple (much as Piso had hidden with the sacristan of the temple of Vesta). Then, helped by a clever ex-slave, he put on the linen robes of a devotee of the Egyptian goddess Isis, and joined a procession of her worshippers who were passing through the neighborhood. (We can only conjecture what they were about, but there was a cult of Isis Capitolina.) In this disguise Domitian made his way to the house of a client of his father, and lay low until the fighting ended. Suetonius tells a slightly different story in his Life of Domitian, and much has been made of the supposed discrepancies between the two versions. But what concerns Tacitus is not Domitian’s itinerary and his perhaps unheroic behavior, but the contrast between the debt he owed to Isis and the payment he made to Jupiter. In his father’s reign, says Tacitus, Domitian demolished the sacristan’s quarters and put up a small shrine to Jupiter the Life-Saver, its altar embellished with a marble relief that depicted his adventures. Once he was emperor, he dedicated a massive temple to Jupiter the Guardian and set a statue of himself sitting in the lap of the god’s cult image. Truly important persons were not saved by foreign deities it seems. Rome’s principal god took care of them personally.

  Sabinus and Quinctius Atticus, on the other hand, were thrown in chains and taken to Vitellius. Although he was willing to treat them in kindly fashion, neither his troops nor those of the common people who had gathered around approved. The former grumbled noisily, wanting to round off their achievement with two more deaths, and the latter demanded Sabinus’ execution with a mixture of threats and flattery. They had their way. Sabinus was decapitated and his headless trunk was dragged to the “Stairs of Lamentation” and exposed there, before being thrown in the Tiber, this being the punishment humble folk liked to see meted out to highborn criminals. “We have heard,” says Tacitus, “that the death delighted Mucianus.” To this he adds that many thought it in the state’s best interests that Sabinus die, since that ended the rivalry between men, one of whom was too conscious of being the emperor’s brother, the other too conscious that he had a potential coruler on his hands. The life of Quinctius Atticus was spared, however. Vitellius resisted the calls for his execution, “as if repaying a favor.” When Atticus was questioned about the origin of the fire, he accepted the responsibility for it, and “by that confession, or perhaps it was a lie to suit the occasion, shifted the blame and the disgrace off the shoulders of the Vitellians.”

  While Aulus Vitellius’ troops disposed of Sabinus, his brother Lucius took care of the desperadoes in Tarracina. Apinius Tiro had left with the urban cohort shortly before Lucius’ attack (18/19 December), and was extorting money and supplies from neighboring towns. His efforts were not very successful, but this probably worried him not at all. The plunder was intended only to let him and his partners continue living high on the hog—as the other two were doing. Julianus, Apollinaris, and the mix of gladiators and marines they commanded were so busy enjoying themselves that the region echoed with their noisy parties, and war was something they discussed only over meals. Though Lucius could have made short work of such opponents anyway, a slave escaped from the town and promised that, if given a small force, he would seize the unguarded citadel and then open the main gates. So Lucius positioned the rest of his troops on the heights overlooking the town and, when the signal was given, “they ran down to a massacre rather than a battle.” Caught off guard, the enemy panicked. Though a few gladiators fought bravely, everybody else ran for the ships, including the townsfolk, since the Vitellians were slaughtering them too. Six warships got away, Apollinaris on one of them. The rest were captured on shore or sank under the weight of the refugees who poured aboard. But Julianus was taken prisoner, dragged before Lucius Vitellius, and killed on the spot. Then, to individualize this particular sack, Tacitus adds: “some said that Lucius’ wife Triaria put on a soldier’s sword and stamped around the town in an arrogant and savage manner.” There is no telling whether this is true, but Triaria almost certainly accompanied her husband south, and this is exactly the kind of behavior of which she was thought capable.

  Lucius sent a dispatch to his brother to announce his success, but he also asked for instructions, uncertain whether to complete the suppression of the revolt in Campania or to return to Rome. To him it may not have looked as foolish an action as it does to us. The Capitol had fallen, after all, and Antonius’ forces were still some way off. In fact, once they had completed their work at Narnia on 16 or 17 December, they advanced only another 12 Roman miles down the Flaminian Way to Ocriculum (Otricoli). This put them 44 miles f
rom the city, and there they halted, in part at least to celebrate the Saturnalia, the Roman winter festival that began on 17 December and ran for six days. Though the festival was observed even by Roman armies, Tacitus declares that “they gave as their pretext for this improper delay that it was to wait for Mucianus.” He expands on this by reporting that “some” alleged that Antonius was delaying on purpose, because he had received secret letters from Vitellius in which the latter kept on offering him a consulship, his own daughter in marriage, and a sizable dowry, if only he changed sides. “Others” declared this a fiction, created to ingratiate its originators with Mucianus. “Some more” asserted that the plan agreed on by all the generals was to make a show of force rather than an attack on Rome. To them it seemed likely that Vitellius would give up power, now that his bravest cohorts had changed sides and no other forces could intervene. But this plan was wrecked by Sabinus’ rashness and incompetence.