Up to a point, his career maintained the lustre of his forebears. A survivor of five reigns and immensely rich to boot, he had served as consul in 33 and governor successively of Upper Germany (an appointment by Gaius, following Gaetulicus’ conspiracy), Africa (at Claudius’ intervention) and, beginning in 60, Nearer Spain. (This last was a miscall on Nero’s part. Suspicious of private citizens whose esteem soared too high, Nero nevertheless overlooked Galba’s lofty reputation on the grounds, Plutarch tells us, ‘that he was thought to be of a gentle nature, and his great age gave an added confidence that he would always act with caution’.5) It was more than a case of boxes ticked and trouble avoided. Under Tiberius, Galba advanced through the stages of the cursus honorum in orderly fashion (that canny old cynic of an emperor smiled at predictions of a glorious destiny for Galba in old age). He served Gaius, Claudius and Nero without mishap. Although the hallmarks of his governorships were his unrelenting military discipline, a legalistic frame of mind hardwired to inclemency and undoubted personal incorruptibility, Plutarch, in his role of Galba’s apologist, records that he won golden words in Germany and Africa. Unenlightened, uncharismatic and solidly business-like as his approach appears with hindsight, the proconsulship brought him triumphal regalia and a trio of priesthoods. Family background increased his prestige: certainly he himself thought so. After three decades of public service, in the prominent display of his family tree he asserted his own superiority, trusting in the Roman belief in heredity; and aligned himself with the deified Julius (both invincibly patrician, both claiming descent from the firmament). It was a dangerous raising of the bar. Caesar had exploited family grandeur not primarily in a spirit of self-congratulation, but as part of a larger plan of legitimizing claims to pre-eminence based on solid achievement. A century after Caesar, in a world schooled to mistrust every claim of high birth bar the Julio-Claudians’, Galba’s family tree was intended of itself to guarantee his reign. Predictably it failed.
For Galba was indeed an old man. All the sources remark on his age: his body twisted with arthritis; the peculiar, unexplained growth of skin that hung from the left side of his torso, held in place by bandages; the hands unable to unroll documents; the gauntness of his face which accentuated the prominence of his nose (noble only in numismatic profile). Even the boy who attended him at public sacrifices in Spain had snow-white hair, its colour transformed from that of youth to age in an instant by way of omen. Galba’s appearance, Tacitus and Dio agree, gave rise to ridicule – more than that, disgust. Tacitus blames widespread lack of judgement in degraded times, a childish and superficial outlook in which emperors were valued for ‘the beauty and grace of their persons’: we hear the historian’s contempt.6 But there was more to it than that. Galba’s age was noteworthy since it marked him out as a survivor. In 68 he was one of a handful of scions of the great senatorial families of the Republic to have escaped imperial purges. His real distinction was not the cartography of grandeur revealed in his family tree, but his age, which in turn implied isolation. In his youth he had venerated customs of the past described by Suetonius as old and forgotten, including requiring his freedmen and slaves to appear before him twice a day, ‘greeting him in the morning and bidding him farewell at evening, one by one’. Remote in outlook, mostly bereft of his peer group, this scrawny veteran represented a vanished moment. His challenge was to resist turning back the clock... the lure of anachronisms... an approach to the principate informed by unreliable memories of the Republic. ‘As yet my strength is unimpaired,’ he responded to a courtier who congratulated him on his appearance of vigour. It was a quotation from Homer and suitably heroic, but sycophant and emperor knew that both dissembled. Galba’s appearance betrayed his age and physical condition. Self-deluded, too arrogant to concern himself with popular feeling, he failed to recognize that it was his age which shaped the instability of his regime, inspiring widespread and unsettling speculation about the identity of his successor – Suetonius claims this as the principal topic of conversation across Italy. It was a further weight on the emperor’s shoulders. As we have seen, the burdens of empire weighed heavily on men far younger than Galba.
Last man standing is no basis for leadership choices. In 68, with Nero still on the throne, Galba could be presented as the obvious candidate to replace him (although this view was never universal). Distinguished by his record of service, his proximity to the imperial house through five reigns and his unimpeachable aristocracy, he ought to have lent his name to the gentlest of revolutions. The adrenaline of the great endeavour of toppling Nero may have prevented far-sightedness. ‘The nobility of his birth and the perils of the times made what was really indolence pass for wisdom,’ Tacitus claimed. ‘He seemed greater than a subject while he was yet in a subject’s rank, and by common consent would have been pronounced equal to empire had he never been emperor.’7 It is among the historian’s best-known epitaphs and acknowledges that, despite his mistakes, Galba, like emperors before him and after him, was a victim as much as a villain.
The creation of an emperor outside Rome began with a letter from Gaul. Its author was himself a romanized Gaul of royal descent. Gaius Julius Vindex was provincial governor of Gallia Lugdunensis. He would be dead within the year, killed for setting in motion a revolution. First steps included a rallying cry to fellow Gauls against conditions within the province and, looking further afield, Nero’s inadequacies as emperor. To fellow governors, including Galba, Vindex dispatched overtures inviting support.
Encouraged by Vinius, Galba responded to Vindex’ invitation on 2 April 68. (It is likely that tentative consultation among provincial governors had occupied him in the interim.) At Nova Carthago, he was acclaimed ‘General of the Senate and People of Rome’, a careful piece of equivocation which avoided such overtly imperial titles as ‘Caesar’ and ‘Augustus’. The import of this inflammatory, deliberately Republican-sounding salutation was clear nonetheless and is said to have caused the histrionic Nero to faint. Suetonius justifies septuagenarian treachery on the grounds that Galba had intercepted instructions from Nero ordering his own assassination, an explanation which smacks of revisionism by Galban sympathizers at a later date. A more plausible catalyst is the death of Corbulo at Nero’s hands the previous year in the aftermath of victory in Armenia. That vindictive and irrational murder may have suggested to Galba the extent of Nero’s erratic misanthropy, the uncertain rewards of service and the precariousness of his own position.
Like Vindex before him, Galba requested local assistance. First to offer support was the governor of Lusitania, Marcus Salvius Otho, a disaffected former confidant of Nero and exhusband of Nero’s wife Poppaea. Next Tiberius Julius Alexander, prefect of Egypt. Tardier was the commander of the legions in Upper Germany, Lucius Verginius Rufus, who may have been influenced in his protracted ambivalence by the overwhelming dislike of his troops for Galba.8 His own legions’ first choice to replace Nero, Rufus twice refused to be acclaimed emperor by his men. Instead, as he was bound to do, he put down Vindex’ revolt, at the end of which Vindex was forced to commit suicide.8
Vindex’ defeat briefly shook Galba’s confidence. He withdrew to Clunia, a hill-town in the north of his province. There the course of Roman history was decided by timely discoveries in the Temple of Jupiter. A prophecy whose existence was revealed to the priest in a dream announced ‘that one day there would come forth from Spain the ruler and lord of the world’. Galba responded energetically. From the province’s leading nobles, he created an ersatz ‘senate’ intended to assist him. Appropriating the revenues of imperial property within the province, he had already set about increasing the armed forces at his disposal. Both courses of action – practical on the one hand, nodding towards Republican constitutional propriety on the other – steadied his resolve when he learned that Nero had dispatched troops under Petronius Turpilianus and Rubrius Gallus to quash his rebellion (in fact Gallus defected and Turpilianus’ troops deserted).9
The defection which made Ga
lba emperor of Rome, however, happened within the city itself. A low-born adventurer took it upon himself to turn king-maker. In the first instance his motives were probably self-preservation.
Nymphidius Sabinus was the son of an imperial freedwoman. Thanks to his slipshod approach to truthfulness, his father is unknown, but chief contenders include a gladiator called Marcianus and the emperor Gaius. By 65 prefect of the Praetorian Guard alongside Tigellinus, three years later Nymphidius had manoeuvred himself into a position of virtual control. It was a heady achievement for a man of unbridled ambition lacking scruples. Apparently more aware than Nero of the extent of the rebellion fomenting Empire-wide, Nymphidius embarked on a calculated gamble. He decided to transfer his allegiance to Galba. He would take with him the allegiance of the Praetorian Guard, that company of emperor-makers whose loyalty to Augustus’ descendants had previously ranked high among the latter’s trump cards.
It was a tall order but, as time would show, Nymphidius did not shrink from challenges. On the night of 8 June he announced to the Praetorians that Nero had abandoned the city and that they, the emperor’s personal guard, were without an emperor. Then, in Galba’s name, making free with that immense fortune which he anticipated shortly having at his disposal, he promised them a donative bigger than any paid to date: 30,000 sesterces a man. On the same day the senate had declared Galba Rome’s newest princeps; the following day, Nero committed suicide. But if Nymphidius had correctly judged the mood of the moment and the spirit of the men in his charge, he had misjudged his new master. Nymphidius’ donatives would never be paid: too soon his broken promises contributed to Galba’s death.
Galba set out for Rome, dressed, Suetonius tells us, in a cloak with a dagger hanging around his neck, the very model of military vigour had it not been for his physical decrepitude. At Narbo Martius in August, with every appearance of charm and consideration, he met representatives of the senate, entertaining them in a style of simple dignity that surely aped his earliest memories of Augustus. Conspicuously he disdained to make use of the palace furniture sent from Rome by Nymphidius (indeed, he pointedly omitted to acknowledge Nymphidius’ gift): the power entrusted to him recognized a lifetime’s service to the state, not at this stage a trumpery affair requiring stage-sets and elaborate costumes. In that spirit, early coin issues acclaimed an emperor of messianic qualities with no hint of personal grandeur. Considered and propagandist as with all imperial coinage, they were careful to temper Galba’s attributes with proper acknowledgement of the role of the senate (which was virtually no role at all bar the maintenance of appearances in the face of considerable force majeure). They attested an emperor chosen ‘by the Senate’s decree for saving the citizens of Rome’ no less,10 and predictably celebrated peace, safety, liberty, harmony (a quality Galba’s rule would do much to jeopardize) and, more controversially, Galba’s equity (time would show that a vindictive emperor interpreted the term in the light of his own harsh requirements). Subsequent ironies notwithstanding, it was a dialect of selflessness and civic-mindedness at the outset of Galba’s reign, old-fashioned duty before personal gain; and a whitewashing of those reservations about Galba’s candidature which may have existed in many breasts that summer when legions and adventurers dictated the corollary to Nero’s death.
In late October or early November, at the end of a progress described by Tacitus as ‘slow and blood-stained’, Galba arrived in Rome. That night the theatre staged Atellan farces, those runaround comedies of low humour and ribald buffoonery popular in the Republic (even Sulla was said to have turned his hand to writing an Atellan farce). It was an evening distinguished by laughter, most of it, according to Suetonius, at Galba’s expense. For the Atellan farces, forerunners of pantomime and the commedia dell’arte, employed a small number of stock characters, among them a fat man, a clown and an old man on the brink of decrepitude. That night the old man was a skinflint bumpkin called ‘Onesimus’. ‘Here comes Onesimus from his farm,’ began the actors. Like a ripple the laughter began. The audience joined in the song. When it finished, they began it again. And then again. Accompanying words with actions. Over and over that night they laughed at Onesimus-Galba. Their laughter was a complex emotion: born of relief certainly, but also of fear. For the crowd had heard a rumour of tidings outside the theatre, and what they had heard supplied grounds for apprehension.
It was, in its way, as much a public spectacle as any stage performance. Unlike slapstick comedy, it did not provoke laughter. According to Dio, more than 7,000 men were killed in an encounter with Galba’s convoy at the Milvian Bridge on the outskirts of Rome (the real figure may be much smaller: the rumour itself is significant). The men were sailors whom Nero had recruited to form an impromptu legion. Greeting Galba noisily, they petitioned for formal acknowledgement of their altered status. The disciplinarian Galba had no truck with popular pressure and responded evasively. It was a tinderbox moment. Vociferously the would-be soldiers reiterated their protests; some even drew their swords. Goaded by fury, Galba gave orders to the troops under his command. They charged the protesters. Fatalities were widespread. With a semblance of calm restored, Galba thrust home his point. He ordered decimation, that obsolete Republican punishment by which errant soldiers themselves killed one in ten of their number by lot, while the nine randomly chosen survivors were compelled to watch. His orders were carried out. ‘This shows that even if Galba was bowed down with age and disease,’ Dio comments, pursuing a train of thought surely intended to echo Galba’s own, ‘yet his mind was vigorous and he did not believe that an emperor should submit to compulsion in anything.’11
Not only fellow soldiers watched that day, but those crowds of the public who had journeyed to greet the emperor. Even in a city habituated to bloodshed, currently overrun with soldiers and balanced in a precarious peace, their response is predictable. For they had witnessed a portent more powerful than foaling mules or white-haired sacristans or centuries-old predictions interred in temple precincts. Later the same month, as they had wished, Galba formed the remaining soldier-sailors into a regular unit, Legio I Adiutrix.
Nero’s marines were not the only casualties of Galba’s march to Rome. By the time the winter emperor reached his capital, his axe of retribution had swung widely. Petronius Turpillianus, that general dispatched by Nero to quell Galba’s rebellion, was forced to commit suicide for his loyalty, despite the defection of his troops which had prevented him from inflicting on Galba any more than unease. Betuus Cilo had requested assistance in quashing Vindex’ rebellion: he died for his pains. Ditto Fonteius Capito, governor of Lower Germany, killed by Fabius Valens and Cornelius Aquinus with Galba’s acquiescence, neither exact motives nor circumstances of his murder easy to unravel. In Africa, Galban loyalists destroyed the legionary legate Clodius Macer, suspected of restricting the grain supply in order to strengthen his attempt to seize the throne. By late autumn, Nymphidius Sabinus had also breathed his last. His eminence had been brief. Once frustration with Galba’s refusal to co-opt him as his principal adviser tipped the balance and encouraged Nymphidius to canvas for the throne on his own behalf, his days were numbered. Men of the Praetorian Guard killed him, leaving the way open for Galba’s preferred candidate, Laco, to command their unit. Cingonius Varro, elected to the consulate for 69, ‘a corrupt and venal orator’, according to Tacitus, was killed for having written the speech Nymphidius proposed to deliver to the Praetorians.
Luckier than most, in 68 Verginius Rufus escaped with his life. Loyal to Nero in punishing Vindex, he was saved by verbal pedantry: although he had renounced the throne for himself, he had also resisted open opposition to Galba by repeatedly stating that he would abide by the choice of the senate. His reward in the short term was an existence of notable uncertainty. It was mercy after a fashion. Not enough to convince any of those who had witnessed the brutality of the Milvian Bridge. Popular outrage focused in particular on the deaths of Cingonius Varro and Petronius Turpillianus, both of them senators of mature years
.
Galba ‘considered that he had not seized the power but that it had been given to him (indeed he was constantly making this statement),’ Dio writes.12 As in his coinage, so in his public pronouncements: it was Galba’s version of Augustus’ illusion, himself called to serve, power a burden accepted with reluctance. The emperor may have intended more than lip-service by such posturing. Evidence for his relationship with the senate is scant but does not support the inference of Dio’s statement, namely that Galba made steps towards forsaking autocracy in favour of government more in line with Republican precept: like all of his predecessors, he rated his own power more highly than that of the senate. Admittedly, Galba himself was of senatorial stock. Those quick-fire reprisals ordered on the journey to Rome unnerved both his own and Neronian supporters. In addition, Suetonius reports an unsubstantiated rumour that Galba had in mind a plan almost certain to win the senate’s disapprobation. He contemplated restricting to two years the duration of those military commands, governorships and procuratorships which traditionally comprised elements of the careers of senators and equestrians. His targets were ambition and corruption. It was in part a continuation of Nero’s policy of rewarding mediocrity. Since the outcome was to deny potential conspirators any platform for the purple, the only beneficiary would be Galba himself. It was also an incursion into the political sphere of the emperor’s parade-ground discipline. As such it smacked of the sort of tyrannous high-handedness associated with the worst of Galba’s predecessors. Suetonius is clear that in future appointments would only be made to those who ‘did not wish them and declined them’, perversity befitting Tiberius or Gaius. Dangerous, too, deliberately to engender a culture in which dissembling and dissimulation became essential.
The Twelve Caesars Page 18