by Gwyn Morgan
As if this were not complication enough, making that choice has become entangled in another conundrum. All our literary sources drew material from the so-called common source (see Appendix 1), and even though we cannot establish how reliable he was, his existence has been used as an argument to prove Plutarch more trustworthy than Tacitus on both emperors. The basic thesis is straightforward: the author who seems to follow the common source without deviation (that is, Plutarch) becomes by definition less manipulative than the author who recasts the material (that is, Tacitus). On this ground he is held to be the more reliable of the two in other areas as well, because less inclined to adjust the evidence to suit his own purposes, literary or otherwise.
It is easy to prove that Tacitus “massaged” the evidence from time to time. Consider, for example, the remark that those who contemplate treason are already traitors. This Plutarch attributes to Titus Vinius at the meeting in April 68 where he urged Galba to assume the leadership of the revolt against Nero. Tacitus uses it as the final argument advanced by Licinius Mucianus in August 69 to persuade Vespasian to take up arms against Vitellius. Clearly, Tacitus has recycled and relocated a noteworthy comment he could not otherwise have fit into his annalistic narrative.1 It is hard to see how this proves distortion or bias, nonetheless. The remark is misattributed, to be sure, but it is set in much the same kind of context to much the same end, and it is hardly impossible that two different men at opposite ends of the Mediterranean should have had the same basic idea within 15 months of one another, when they found themselves in the same predicament. By our standards, Tacitus has played fast and loose with the evidence, but this case—and others like it—fail to prove either that he twisted or distorted that evidence, or that the common source did not.
So, to revert to the common source, the main support for the idea that he presented a more honest picture of the situation in 68/69 seems to spring from the way in which Plutarch constructs his Lives of Galba and Otho. They are not self-contained structures like his later Lives of Noble Greeks and Romans or, for that matter, Suetonius’ Lives of the two emperors. Instead, they are slices of history. The Galba—after its obligatory preface—covers the period from Nero’s fall in early June 68 to Galba’s murder in mid-January 69. This is one reason both for the prominence given to Nymphidius Sabinus at the start of the work, and for the material on Otho and Vitellius that bulks it out. Similarly, the Otho covers the period between 15 January and 16 April 69, and includes all the historical events that Plutarch thought relevant within these limits. There is less extraneous matter than in the Galba, but Plutarch probably says more about Caecina and Valens than he needed to. And so we come to the real point behind—or the catch in—the argument. If Plutarch took the layout of his material and the facts he chose to report from the common source in as mechanical a manner as he appears to have done, he ought ex hypothesi to have taken over the common source’s views on Galba and Otho just as mechanically. And since Tacitus, and Suetonius too for that matter, offer different assessments, we can accuse them of distorting the record from bias or malice, and dismiss their accounts out of hand.
This is an incredibly naive argument. Even if we take it on its own terms, it tells us only that Plutarch followed the common source more mechanically than did Tacitus, not that the common source’s account was any less skewed in one direction than Tacitus’ was in the other. And even slices of history are not immune to Al Smith’s famous observation that “no matter how thin you slice it, it’s still baloney.” For a start, it is inherently improbable that any Roman writer, the common source or any other author one might care to name, composed a favorable account of Galba’s principate after he was dead. Although Tacitus may exaggerate, he insists that each and every emperor had been vilified once he was dead. Then too, it is easy to show that Plutarch cleaned up Galba’s image. He suppressed all reference to Galba’s sexual tastes, a subject on which Suetonius waxed eloquent.2 And rather than admit that Galba was manipulated by his three pedagogues, Plutarch pushed Laco and Icelus into the background and cast Titus Vinius as his evil genius, clearly to exculpate the emperor. Arguments as disingenuous as this were as easy to float in Roman times as they are today. But no Roman writer would have subscribed to the idea that an emperor could shrug off responsibility for his subordinates’ misdeeds, not Tacitus, not Suetonius, and since he too wrote after Galba was dead, not the common source.
So Plutarch’s characterization of Galba has to be largely his own work, and that hardly makes it more reliable than our other accounts. And it is not hard to see why he should have viewed the emperor so favorably. First, as is evident from remarks he makes in other works, Plutarch recognized as a Greek that Nero’s philhellenism had benefited his countrymen, but as an inhabitant of the empire, he saw that the emperor’s self-indulgence had nearly destroyed the established order. So a firmer, stricter ruler was much to be preferred. Second, the thesis on the evil soldiery adumbrated in the preface to the Galba required that Galba be presented as the relatively innocent victim of the machinations of Nymphidius Sabinus. Third, Roman citizen or not, Plutarch was an outsider, and his readiness to blame others shows that he was as willing to make excuses for a man he thought a good ruler as Russian serfs would be in later centuries to blame a czar’s shortcomings on his evil ministers. And fourth, Plutarch admired old men. Later in life he would not only compose a treatise on the question whether the old should be put in charge of public affairs, but answer it affirmatively too.
This is important, because it gives us the means to undermine Plutarch’s presentation of Otho as well. Not only is there the obvious point that if the biographer admired Galba so much, he would not have warmed to Galba’s murderer. There is also a more telling point. As soon as we grant that Plutarch’s interpretation of Galba is not derived from the common source, we are under no compulsion to hold that he drew his picture of Otho from that source either.
This is not conclusive, of course. But there is another line of argument that will confirm its essential accuracy, the way in which Plutarch, Tacitus, and Suetonius viewed a man’s character. This is a very controversial subject, in good measure because ancient ideas of character differed significantly from ours. But though oversimplification is perilous, it seems fair to say that all three authors believed or, when it suited them, chose to operate on the principle that a man’s character was a given or, if not that, at least predictable within limits. Usually, there would be a pattern behind his actions indicating that he was a certain “type” of person.3 In its simplest form, this meant that somebody who was good was good from birth to death, and somebody who was born bad died bad, whether or not he also died badly. So Suetonius presents Nero as a bad emperor, both because his ancestors were vicious and because he manifested from the start a predisposition to do wrong. Tacitus’ Tiberius is a man who did not look as evil at the start of his reign as he became by its end, and so must in his earlier years have hidden his vices behind a veil of hypocrisy. And in his Lives of Noble Greeks and Romans Plutarch regularly used as valid indications of an adult’s predisposition incidents that took place at almost any point in his childhood.
This was never a rigid principle, however. It was more like a rule of thumb, and there was always wiggle room, some freedom to pick and choose when, where, and how to apply it. Had it not been so, Tacitus might have been hard put to declare Vespasian the first man to be improved by becoming emperor.4 But the situation became far more problematical when an ancient author was confronted with a paradoxical character, a man who switched from good to bad, or from bad to good, on a grand scale, or throughout his life mixed virtues and vices not commonly associated with one another. Such “antitypes” were irresistible from a rhetorical point of view, since their conduct generated contrast after contrast, as in Dio’s portrait of Caligula. But from a historical, biographical, or moralistic point of view, it could prove difficult to explain a sudden, marked change in a subject’s patterns of behavior without invoking madness (as in Su
etonius’ portrait of Caligula), or to attribute a subject’s mixing good and bad qualities to anything more than fate or sheer contrariness. And so we come back to Otho.
Otho obviously qualified as a paradoxical character. First, there was his murdering Galba to seize power for himself and his committing suicide in a vain attempt to end the slaughter. Second, there was the contradiction in his “type,” an aspect the common source summed up in the statement that “Otho’s mind was not effeminate like his body.” This we know because it turns up in Plutarch, in Tacitus, and in Suetonius. Now, none of our three sources embraces the idea that the suicide canceled out the assassination, or that the suicide justified a reassessment of the murder. Suetonius comes fairly close, when he reports that some people claimed after Otho’s death that he had assassinated Galba for the good of the state, but he himself still balks. So all three writers regarded Otho as a villain to one degree or another. Where they differed was in their explanations of how he became a villain, and what kind of villain he was. Hence all three picked up from the common source the proposition that “Otho’s mind was not effeminate like his body,” even though the distinction being made was not new in and of itself.5
Any modern assessment of Otho must obviously stand or fall on the question how we exploit this statement. But there can be no certainty about where in his narrative the common source set it, and what kind of significance he attached to it, since Plutarch, Tacitus, and Suetonius each use it differently. The one thing of which we can be reasonably sure is that Suetonius is most likely to have moved it to an entirely different context. The besetting vice of his Otho being impetuosity, even the decision to commit suicide is taken on the fly, as soon as Otho hears that his army has been defeated decisively at Bedriacum. But since Suetonius subscribes explicitly to the view that Otho killed himself in hopes of avoiding further bloodshed (an idea his own father no doubt drummed into him), he uses the statement as a way of creating the strongest possible contrast between Otho’s previous conduct and his demeanor during the last 24 hours of his life. Hence his assertion that “the manner of Otho’s death” was “entirely at odds with his way of life.” There is also a literary consideration at work. In the Otho, Suetonius lays out his material in the same way as in the Galba, and switches from his subject’s death to a description of his physical appearance. As the context shows, he thought the common source’s dictum tailor-made to facilitate that transition.
This may seem to leave us with two possibilities, unless we merely throw up our hands in despair. The first is to accept Plutarch’s placement and handling of the remark, even though he strips it of virtually all its significance. He sets the comment at the point in his narrative where Otho arrives in the Forum on the morning of 15 January to find that only 23 praetorian guardsmen have gathered there, and he buries it inside a sentence that undercuts its force: “though Otho’s mind was not effeminate like his body, he was terrified by the smallness of the turn-out.” The other option is to follow Tacitus, who makes the comment the key to his interpretation, by setting it programmatically at the head of his narrative of the plan to assassinate Galba. After that, it underlies everything the Tacitean Otho does, up to and including his suicide. Hence the Tacitean Otho decides before Bedriacum that he will commit suicide, if the battle goes against him.
In fact, we can reach a kind of compromise between these options. There is good reason to think that the common source set his statement in more or less the same context as Plutarch places it. For one thing, Plutarch would have had far more difficulty sweeping the comment under the rug, had the common source made it the key to his interpretation of the emperor. And for another, Plutarch did indeed follow the common source more mechanically than did Tacitus. Yet it is wildly improbable that the common source would have buried an epigram powerful enough to impress our three surviving sources in a sentence that robbed it of its force. On the contrary, he would most likely have given it exactly the opposite spin, producing a sentence along the lines that though Otho was surprised by the smallness of the turnout, he did not lose his nerve, because….
To explain why Plutarch disarmed the comment is relatively easy. Of our three authors he had the greatest difficulty in dealing with, and the least use for, a paradoxical “type.” This is evident from his Lives of Lysander and Sulla, unless we engage in special pleading. Moreover, Plutarch tended anyway to flatten out idiosyncrasies. In Otho’s case he seems to have gone still further, and to have rejected altogether the notion that his was a paradoxical character. Treating Otho as a “normal” personality, a man whose behavior could be seen always in one light, he could not refer back to his youth or education (a staple of the Parallel Lives, these topics do not appear in the Galba and the Otho). But he found the ammunition he needed to justify his preexisting determination to view Otho unfavorably in the latter’s behavior as a courtier in Nero’s reign. Not only had Otho been a boon companion of an emperor whose self-indulgence had nearly wrecked the empire. The bizarre details of the Otho-Poppaea-Nero triangle also “proved” his worthlessness, leading Plutarch to assert that Otho won fame first by marrying Poppaea, just as had Paris of Troy by marrying Helen. Plutarch does not recur to this motif, but it is clearly a vital element in his portrait of an emperor who, like his Homeric counterpart, was an effeminate, villainous weakling from start to finish.
Now come two related questions: why Tacitus took an incidental insight and turned it into a programmatic interpretation, and whether we are justified in following his lead. It is all very well to point out that Tacitus clearly revels in the contradiction created by an Otho whose every action is the result of cold, hard calculation when his physical appearance and his entire mode of life suggest that he is incapable of such behavior. Indeed, Tacitus’ Otho personifies one of his idées fixes, that things are not always as they seem, and that realities need not match appearances any more than words correspond with deeds. It still does not follow that his portrait is the result solely, or even largely, of authorial caprice. Both Tacitus and the common source before him seem to have been as powerless to get over the enormity of Otho’s assassinating Galba as the emperor’s contemporaries. Both appear to have decided, that is, that such an outrage could be neither explained nor explained away by invoking emotions like impetuosity, disappointment, desperation, or effeminate spitefulness. So, at some point, a measure of iron must have entered Otho’s soul, and the question was when. The common source placed it in Otho’s encounter with the guardsmen in the Forum, because that was when he was first tested by an untoward turn of events. Tacitus backdated it to the point when Otho began planning Galba’s assassination, since the planning of such an outrage required the same hard-headedness as the doing of the deed. Besides, Tacitus has presented Otho as a devotee of astrology and, more particularly, a firm believer in the prediction that he would become emperor. All in all, it adds up to a persuasive picture. Unlike Macbeth, Otho did not merely talk a good game. He delivered.
The Tacitean picture of Otho may be overdrawn, but that is not enough to invalidate it. We can complain that it is oversimplified, but even this will not justify our setting it aside in favor of the portraits drawn by Plutarch and Suetonius. All three authors hold that one key opens every door. To this extent it is legitimate to contend that the historical Otho was probably a far more complex personality, less consistent in his thinking and in his behavior patterns than our sources pretend. But unless or until fresh evidence emerges, we must make a choice. And this is not a case where we can argue plausibly that the outsider, Plutarch, saw more of the game. Even if it is only by default, our wisest option is to settle for the idea or—in more highfalutin’ terms—the working hypothesis that the historical Otho combined in some measure the drives attributed to him by Tacitus and Suetonius.
Appendix 3:
Checklist of the Legions
Operational in 68/69
When Augustus set up the principate, he created a standing army whose backbone was constituted eventually by 28
legions of heavy infantry, each numbering supposedly about 5,000 men. Some of the legions traced their origins back to Julius Caesar (most obviously V Alaudae); some were raised in the triumviral period, when the Roman world was carved up by Marc Antony, Marcus Lepidus, and Octavian (Tacitus tells us that III Gallica had served with Antony). And some were new units formed by Augustus after he established the principate. Because of their different origins, and because of the importance the men attached to the records of their units, a consistent, consecutive numbering system was never applied. Numerals were often repeated, and legions with the same number were distinguished by title. So, for example, there were three third legions, one titled Augusta, one Cyrenaica, and one Gallica.
Since Augustus lost 3 legions in the Varian Disaster of 9 (XVII–XIX, numbers never used again), only 25 units remained when he died. By the time Vespasian was recognized as emperor by the senate in December 69 the total had risen to 30. Two new legions were created by Caligula (XV Primigenia and XXII Primigenia), 1 by Nero (I Italica), and 2 by Galba (I Adiutrix and VII Galbiana). There was 1 more unit (I Macriana Liberatrix), the work of Clodius Macer in Africa, but it lasted only for a few months in 68. As emperor, Vespasian disbanded 4 legions that had followed Vitellius (I Germanica, IV Macedonica, XV Primigenia, and XVI), though he incorporated some of the men into 2 new legions, IV Flavia Felix and XVI Flavia Firma (hence their numbering), and he regularized the creation of yet another legion (II Adiutrix), giving a total of 29. For the sake of convenience I have given a brief account of all the units except Vespasian’s two new creations, since every one of them turns up sooner or later in the Year of the Four Emperors. Each entry is designedly self-contained, though this has led to some repetition, and where it seems appropriate, I have included specific citations of ancient evidence, especially the Tacitean references to the units or their officers in the Histories and those made by Josephus in his War Against the Jews (BJ).