The Twelve Caesars

by Matthew Dennison

  Galba’s seven-month reign was too short for such far-reaching reform. It did, however, permit a policy which demonstrates a similar willingness to deprive its victims of entitlements they considered rightfully their own. Nero’s shadow lay long over Galba’s reign – his profligacy and ill discipline, his un-Roman enfranchisement of elements of society which had no place on the Palatine: actors and artists, Greeks, freedmen, sexual exhibitionists, narcissists, gluttons and popinjays. Most of all, Nero’s extravagance offended Galba. He estimated that Nero had squandered in presents 2,200 million sesterces, a sum sufficiently exorbitant in conjunction with the cost of recent civil disturbance to empty the imperial treasury. Galba’s response was simple: the gifts must be returned. He devised a strategy which permitted recipients to keep a tenth part of their ill-gotten gains. The remainder would be collected by a new bureau of knights, thirty in Tacitus’ account, fifty according to Suetonius. Where recipients were unable to satisfy these repayments (because the money had been spent or items sold or passed on), the recipients at one remove were also liable for restitution. Tacitus commends the plan’s fairness. Its short-term effect was chaos and widespread insolvency. Across Rome auctions proliferated; a flooded market realized paltry prices. The treasury was not replenished. It is hard to see who benefited save those carpet-baggers with an eye to a bargain, Vinius chief among them if we believe Plutarch’s version of events. ‘The business had no limits but was far extended and affected many; it gave the emperor himself a bad name and brought envy and hatred upon Vinius as having made the emperor ungenerous and sordid with everybody else,’ Dio comments.13 This unpopular but high-profile policy did nothing to shore up Galba’s ebbing support. Instead, to a disaffected soldiery were added those remaining adherents of Nero. In the senate house, an encroachment of doubts concerning the emperor’s good sense and political acumen.

  No equivalent of political correctness emasculated Roman humour. The Atellan farces exploited the old, the fat and the silly, each embraced in the open season of Roman ribaldry. Galba’s age, we have seen, concerns the ancient sources. Their preoccupation was not with the comedy value of the emperor’s advancing years nor an anxiety for his wellbeing. The significance of Galba becoming emperor at seventy-two, a greater age then than now, lies in the implications for Rome and the Empire of physical and mental infirmity and any diminishing of the faculties on the part of its supreme governor. Of questionable constitution and preoccupied with the transmission of his legacy, Augustus had spent much of his reign resolving the succession. In the case of Galba, at the beginning of his reign approaching Augustus’ age at death, the question was doubly urgent. Although Augustus had a single daughter, Julia, his choice of successors potentially drew on a wide pool which included Julia’s children, the children and grandchildren of Augustus’ second wife Livia, and the grandchildren of his sister Octavia. The two sons born of Galba’s marriage to Aemilia Lepida had died many years earlier, making his decision less straightforward. It was nevertheless a significant decision for Rome as well as for Galba – although events would prove that the emperor had failed to anticipate fully the nature of that significance to himself.

  Unfinished business set in train the final descent. In 68 the legions of the Rhine had made clear their support for Verginius Rufus. Galba’s summary promotion to office did not inspire a volte-face. For obvious reasons, the new emperor did not make amends by rewarding the German troops for their part in suppressing Vindex’ revolt. Yet whatever Galba’s personal feelings, the reward for duty done was merited by custom and practice. It was one more offence with which to tar Galba’s name.

  Something of the degree of discontent among the provinces’ seven legions was revealed to Vitellius on his arrival in Lower Germany in November. Within less than two months that discontent would manifest itself in aggressive action. Tacitus credits the procurator of Belgica, Pompeius Propinquus, with informing Galba’s government that ‘the legions of Upper Germany had broken through the obligations of their military oath and were demanding another emperor’.14 At the beginning of January, soldiers responded to Flaccus’ insistence that they renew the oath of loyalty to Galba, an annual requirement, with an oath to the senate. The Fourth Legion went further and toppled the emperor’s statues. With a greater understanding than Galba of the source of ultimate power, they resolved, Suetonius relates, ‘to send a deputation to the Praetorians with the following message: that the emperor created in Spain did not suit them and the Guard must choose one who would be acceptable to all the armies’. It would not be the first time the Praetorians had created an emperor. The circumstances surrounding Gaius’ murder and Claudius’ accession almost thirty years before had a surreptitious quality: in the case of Galba’s replacement, the soldiers’ message suggests that the time for circumspection is past. No one any longer doubted the army’s power in emperor-making.

  Except, at the eleventh hour, Galba himself. Ill winds from Germany convinced the emperor that the question of the succession must be settled at once. What is less clear is whether Galba realized the extent of feeling against him nurtured by these same Rhine legions. Certainly not in Suetonius’ account, where Galba interprets dissent as originating from the soldiers’ anxiety about his childlessness. He summoned a council to debate the matter. Predictably his ‘tutors’ pulled him in different directions, each swayed by his own ulterior motive. Galba overlooked the obvious candidate, Marcus Salvius Otho, that governor of Lusitania who had been first to support his bid for power. Given Otho’s ambition and the pains he had taken to cultivate universal good opinion, Galba would pay heavily for this oversight. Fatal indeed was his choice of a humourless thirty-something aristocratic exile without auctoritas, renown or military experience. Lucius Calpurnius Piso Licinianus was distinguished by a stern moroseness and an exalted family tree, both akin to Galba’s own. His character may have resembled that of the middle-aged Tiberius, adopted by Augustus. But Galba’s adoption of Piso betrayed none of the half-heartedness and reservations of that earlier adoption. Unfortunately for Galba, nor did Piso possess Tiberius’ undoubted qualifications for empire. The emperor first announced his decision to the Praetorians. Above the soldiers’ camp, thunder and lightning tore a glowering sky. Rain gashed air heavy with forebodings. Galba’s news was greeted with perfunctory cheering. Few present can have known that, even at this high-water mark in his fortunes, Piso stood not first in line to the throne but third. To the north, the legions of Lower Germany had not waited for Galba’s deliberations but nominated a princeps of their own, their commander Aulus Vitellius. Nearer home, fired by jealousy, a one-time ally was hell-bent on revenge. Otho had no intention of abiding by the decision of Galba and his ‘tutors’.

  He grasped his chance on 15 January. That morning he was the only senator to attend the emperor at his sacrifice, for Galba suspected nothing. Not even when a soothsayer warned that danger was very close at hand did his thoughts turn to Otho. And so a second-rate coup, badly organized and limited in scope, removed that emperor who had been the provincial governors’ riposte to the folly of the last of the Julio-Claudians. Galba was killed in the Forum, amid scenes of confusion and panic, toppled from his litter accidentally, slain where he fell. The shower of blades continued to rain down long after life had departed that twisted body. Piso died too, dragged from the Temple of Vesta and decapitated. Belatedly, as Otho’s forces grabbed the upper hand, emperor and heir had announced payment of the donative Galba would not have paid under happier circumstances. It was too late. Abandoning their milch cow, Vinius, Laco and Icelus struggled to flee, as unworthy of Galba’s trust now as at any point in his fleeting premiership. Vinius was cut down as he ran, stabbed from behind. Laco and Icelus perished later, the latter crucified.

  Portents foretold this grizzly end (impossible that they should resist). As Galba made his autumn journey to Rome, a sacrificial ox, half-butchered and bleeding, furiously broke free of its bonds and charged the old man’s carriage. Animated by agony, it s
tamped and kicked; it showered Galba with blood. The emperor dismounted his carriage and narrowly avoided being impaled on the lance of one of his own guards. Three months later, both pelting by blood and danger from his inner circle were realized in full. Galba’s death possessed something of that nobility his politics had lacked. Humbled on the ground, he offered his neck without resistance or fear to the soldiers who surrounded him. His final command was curt and clear: that they strike him where he knelt, in keeping with their will.

  OTHO

  (AD 32–69)

  ‘If I was worthy to be Roman emperor...’

  Otho: Marcus Salvius Otho Roman emperor, Mary Evans Picture Library

  Otho is Suetonius’ cursed Caesar, Plutarch’s and Tacitus’ too. The accounts agree: the omens were against him. (Plutarch labels them ‘uncertain and of dubious origin’.1) Surrounded at intervals by soothsayers and an astrologer whom Suetonius calls Seleucus, Tacitus and Plutarch Ptolemaeus, Rome’s eighth Caesar ignored every prophecy and portent bar one: that he would escape Nero’s displeasure with his life and survive the last of the Julio-Claudians to rule as emperor of Rome.

  His reign of three months did not outlast the spring. It ended in suicide. His death was noble, heroic, in the grand traditions of a warlike Republic. In the sources its manly rhetoric has the set-piece qualities of a scene from epic poetry or perhaps a history painting. Apparently a vigorous foil to the indolence of his life, Otho’s death comes down to us as the sort of incident which once commended Roman history to British schoolrooms: lessons from one overweening empire appropriated in the service of another. ‘If I was worthy to be Roman emperor, I ought to give my life freely for my country,’ Plutarch’s Otho tells his troops.2 It is the spirit of Kitchener and Kipling and no parody is implied. Alone in the light of a new dawn, uncomplaining, with apparently no thought of personal suffering, he stabbed himself through the heart – like a sacrificial offering, blood spilt to prevent further bloodshed. Only a glass of water steadied his hand. He had first paid bequests to all his staff and destroyed correspondence incriminating to those he left behind.

  Titian painted Otho in the guise of a Renaissance prince. In the copy of that painting which survives, a sword hangs at his side, his cloak surmounts shining armour. His hair is thick and curly (in fact he wore a wig), his arm strong and sinewy (his flesh was smooth from constant depilation); he appears heavily jowled, cheeks dark with a day’s growth of stubble (throughout his life he used bread poultices to soften his skin and reduce facial hair). His expression is petulant, effete: so too the limpness of his pose, despite a stirring backdrop of mountains and penumbrous sky. His appearance confirms the rumour told to Suetonius by his father, that such was Otho’s distaste for violence that the mere mention of the deaths of Brutus and Cassius made him shudder. He is unconvincingly martial. Were it not for the manner of his death, the majority of his contemporaries would have agreed. ‘Believe me when I insist that I can die more honourably than I can reign,’ he abjures his followers.3 Ironically, his very death gave them reason to doubt him. For Otho, this tableau that is both intimate and universal represents a moment of apotheosis. It is a refutation of former waywardness, turning his back on erstwhile mediocrity – surely not the same bandy-legged, splay-footed devotee of Isis who, harried by grievances, had asked pettishly, ‘What truck have I with impossible tasks?’ Or, perhaps, just such a one, giving up when the going gets tough.

  Plutarch described Otho as womanly and unaccustomed to command, a recipe for cowardice, misjudgement and vacillation. In time, in power struggles that were wholly opportunistic, Otho’s luxury and licentiousness would be pitted against the stingy disciplinarianism of Galba and the gluttony and drunkenness of Vitellius: Hobson’s choice. It was a measure of the depths to which Rome’s throne had sunk by the beginning of 69. ‘The most worthless of mortals had been selected... by some fatality to ruin the Empire,’ Tacitus growls of Otho’s conflict with Vitellius.4 Less sceptical sources agree. ‘For as regards prodigality, effeminacy, inexperience in war, and multiplicity of debts incurred in a previous state of poverty, it was hard to say which of them had the advantage.’5 Pique had provoked Otho’s coup; rashness undid him. Neither trait belonged in the arsenal of an emperor. In the first instance Otho was the choice neither of senators nor of soldiers. The decision to rule was his own, taken without consultation or popular pressure (despite the inevitable charade of the recusatio imperii offered to the senate): meagre and selfish in its ambitions. Of similar origin was the bolder decision to abrogate power through suicide. But he made a good death and there were signs that, with a carrying wind, Otho’s principate might have offered a variant of Vespasian’s middle way. Omens and the altar’s bloody entrails decreed otherwise.

  For in truth there was nothing shiftless about Marcus Salvius Otho, big-spending, high-living, loose-loving. By force of will he had maintained the upward trajectory of his recent family history. He did so not via the magistracies of the cursus honorum, as tradition demanded, but through close – some said very close – friendship with Nero, his near contemporary, whom he first met at one of Claudius’ banquets. (Claudius had singled out for praise his father, Lucius Otho, after the latter foiled a conspiracy against the emperor’s life. For the same reason a statue of Lucius decorated the palace, a rare mark of honour. Given the Romans’ belief in the dependability of genetics, Otho cannot have failed to benefit from his father’s high repute.) When the time came, he was also assiduous in courting the favour of all and any who could serve him, ruthless in pursuit of his goal. ‘Altogether [he] acted the slave to make himself the master,’ Tacitus records: the historian does not intend flattery.6 Less laudable tactics included a flirtation with an influential freedwoman comfortably past her sell-by date. Shamelessly, without regard to honesty or kindliness, he pursued this ageing court jade as a conduit to Nero. Determined, though to outward appearance hell-bent on pleasure, Otho affected the courtier’s insouciance. His model is the swan, paddling furiously beneath the water’s smooth surface. His efforts succeeded, or he would not find himself included in our survey. But victory was short-lived in the extreme, the minutes of his reign recorded on a butterfly’s wing-span. He died on 16 April 69, only days before his thirty-seventh birthday and less than a hundred days after being hailed as emperor. Suetonius records the beaten breasts and self-immolation of his supporters in the wake of that gloriously Roman death. His account comes closest to avoiding partisanship. For good measure he reports a claim that is substantiated by nothing in Otho’s life: ‘that he had put an end to Galba not so much for the sake of ruling, as of restoring the republic and liberty.’

  In the sources Otho benefits from his opposition to Vitellius. The Flavians rewrote the history of this year of lawlessness, condemning Vitellius, repudiating Nero. Then as now, Otho occupies middle ground. With hindsight a man of straw, he was a secondary target in Flavian myth-making, the embodiment of the spirit of a misguided moment, no more – an aberrancy, when personal desire superseded claims of birth, prestige, experience or the appetite for public service... and none considered restoration of the Republic and liberty. As we shall see, it was an accusation Vespasian and his sons dare not countenance.

  With civil war came innovation. If Galba was the emperor created outside Rome, Otho was the emperor created outside the ruling classes. We can reach our own conclusion on which was the more radical outcome for precedent-loving Romans. His pinchpenny coup was masterminded by a freedman called Onomastus, an officer of the imperial bodyguard, Barbius Proculus, and Veturius the subaltern. They were abetted in the first instance by a tiny handful of disaffected mercenaries. It was an act of daring which, questionable motives aside, ought not to have succeeded. That it did so indicates inherent weaknesses in the system. Otho’s brief career did nothing to address those weaknesses. Like him, his successor was a man bent on personal gain, propelled by a section of the military beyond his natural ability, in Vitellius’ case an emperor disposed only to the corrupti
bility of power. All that Vitellius had in his favour was a decent bloodline.

  Granted, Otho’s grandfather, also Marcus Salvius Otho, had been a senator. He was the first of his family to be so (his own mother, described as ‘lowly’, may have been a slave: he owed his advancement, according to Suetonius, to Livia’s influence, a connection of sorts with the old regime). Originally the Othones came from Ferentium, descendants of Etruscan princes, a family of ancient lineage and illustrious reputation. There is an echo here of the long-dead Maecenas, whose easy backsliding into lubricious extravagance was also a feature of Otho’s youth (indeed, Lucius Otho regularly flogged his second son for un-Roman frailties). Such ‘distinction’ could not be guaranteed to impress senatorial Rome.

  The principate, however, as we have seen, looked kindly on provincials and those born outside Rome’s aristocracy. Otho senior was evidently sufficiently wealthy to manage the senate’s property qualification; his connection with Livia marks the beginning of a relationship with the imperial court. In the next generation, Lucius Otho endeared himself so successfully to Tiberius (whom he resembled physically) that people believed him to be the emperor’s son. Coquettish freedwomen aside, it would not have been difficult for the younger Marcus Salvius Otho to gain admittance to palace life. But Otho did not stop at winning Nero’s friendship. Five years older than Agrippina’s son, he translated friendship into influence, affinity based on shared interests and similarities (and any sexual liaison the men embarked on); Suetonius claims on his behalf that Otho ‘was privy to all the emperor’s plans and secrets’, including Nero’s plan to kill his mother. It would be wrong at this stage to assume traitorous hankerings on Otho’s part. The sources are clear that he aspired to the throne only once the bonds of friendship had been shattered, a process beginning in the late 50s. In the meantime, if his tastes inclined to power in the short term, he pinned his hopes on a place in Nero’s consilium.