Aided by a clutch of generals – some said too many – Otho had not been entirely lax in his preparations. Assistance was promised in the form of the seven legions of Dalmatia, Pannonia and Moesia: these troops had already embarked on the long journey west. In Rome, sketchy training programmes sought belatedly to ready that rag-tag agglomeration of fighting men which was Otho’s inheritance from the war-shunning Nero, men more used to ‘spectacles and festivals and plays’ than military manoeuvres, according to Plutarch.24 In addition, 2,000 gladiators had been conscripted in the emperor’s cause. Vitellius remained in Germany awaiting further recruits. Active leadership of his campaign belonged to Valens and Caecina. Too late now for Otho’s men to close the Alpine passes: the horse had already bolted. Instead, the Othonians decided to create a defensive frontier along the line of the river Po. It was here, heedless of omens, flushed with victory in a clutch of minor skirmishes and too hasty to await the arrival of first reinforcements from the East, that Otho gave the order for engagement. On 14 April, dizzy with the conflicting advice of his generals, he urged immediate battle. We know for ourselves the outcome.
Plutarch attributes this tactical failure on Otho’s part to a crisis of nerves, and quotes the emperor’s secretary, a rhetorician called Secundus:
Otho himself could not longer bear up against the uncertainty of the issue, nor endure (so effeminate was he and so unused to command) his own thoughts of the dire peril confronting him; but worn out by his anxieties, he veiled his eyes, like one about to leap from a precipice, and hastened to commit his cause to fortune.25
It was the same instinct which prompts men to stake everything on the fall of a card, that fecklessness and daring which, so recently, had won for Otho an empire.
Nothing in that first defeat gave grounds for hopelessness, but Otho’s mind was made up. In Suetonius’ account, his decision to commit suicide rather than further endanger Roman lives was immediate. He did not despair of success in the long run, nor did he mistrust his forces soon to be augmented with the legions of the East. Unusually among Rome’s emperors he had no appetite for blood or the loss of life. ‘Wanton Otho still could win the day,’ Martial wrote afterwards. ‘But cursing war with all its price of blood, He pierced his heart and perished as he stood.’26 He had not led his troops at Bedriacum. Earlier he had won golden words by his presence among his men on the march north: acerbic commentators observed his eleventh-hour disdain for his usually stringent grooming regime. But at the crucial battle he had remained safely to the rear in his camp at Brixellum (modern Brescello). Sound tactics, it was a miscall in terms of morale-boosting and leadership. He would make no such mistakes in death.
Perhaps it was the troops which were the problem. A principate without military support was untenable. But a principate whose only justification was its thraldom to its troops was equally so. For events in Rome had already exposed the hollowness of the charade even before campaigning began. They took the form of an incident interpreted by Suetonius as proof of the affection and loyalty of the Praetorian Guard towards their Caesar. Suetonius glosses over the extent to which that affection and loyalty, in this case spurs to lawlessness, made Otho their puppet and their victim.
A plan to transport troops from their station at Ostia to Rome also involved transportation of military equipment. Unexpectedly, the decision of the commanding officer to begin the process at night, under cover of partial darkness, led to a misapprehension that the real plan was not the safe carriage of arms and armour to the capital but a full-scale coup orchestrated by the senate for Otho’s overthrow. At a gallop, outraged Praetorians made for the imperial palace where Otho was hosting a banquet for eighty leading senators and their wives. The result was temporary anarchy.
For the Praetorians the emperor’s banquet provided an ideal opportunity to eliminate all Otho’s enemies at a sitting. For the senate, the emperor’s perfidy in bringing them together only to kill them exceeded the worst affronts of recent history. For Otho, confused, uncertain and dashed by twin loyalties, it was a graphic illustration of the true nature of the balance of power in his relationship with his personal fighting force. He hastened the senators out of the palace by unfrequented passages. Then, as soldiers stormed the palace, he begged their cooperation with arguments, entreaties and, at last, when no other course prevailed, tears.
Like so much in this year of upheavals and bogus emperors, it was a night of hair-raising indignity. Ill discipline came close to destroying the senate and the emperor’s authority was exposed as non-existent. Otho’s recourse had been the woman’s part of crying. It surely unnerved him. It may too have sickened him. It was an ominous preliminary to civil war.
On the eve of death, a leave-taking. Otho’s brother, his nephew and his friends, Suetonius tells us. Plutarch awards the honours to his nephew Cocceius, ‘who was still a youth’, and whom Otho had intended to adopt as his heir following victory over Vitellius. From uncle to nephew a final imprecation: ‘Do not altogether forget, and do not too well remember, that you had a Caesar for an uncle.’27 At one level a statement of that moderation which had characterized Otho’s brief supremacy, it was also by way of apology. An admission that Otho’s was a principate without legitimacy, justified neither by birth nor even by merit: no grounds for revenge. It had been an exercise in opportunism. A grand, inglorious gamble – reason in the future for family pride – it appeared in the light of defeat too flimsy and unfounded to inspire further bloodshed of the sort Otho meant to avert through his death.
Cocceius dispatched, Otho sought out a quiet, private place in which to write letters. He wrote only two. The first addressed his sister, intended to lessen her sorrow. Otho’s second letter was directed to Statilia Messalina, the noblewoman whom Nero had chosen as his third wife after the death of Poppaea and a long-standing affair. Curly-haired, pale-cheeked, with an overwhelming appearance of resignation both in the Capitoline Museums’ contemporary bust and in a sixteenth-century image by the Mantuan painter Teodoro Ghisi, Messalina had been chosen by Otho to be entrusted with his corpse. More than that, his memory. For it was Nero’s widow Messalina, Suetonius tells us, whom this ambitious one-time coxcomb and former husband of Poppaea had chosen to marry had he lived.
VITELLIUS
(AD 15–69)
‘A series of carousals and revels’
Vitellius: Male bust representing the emperor Vitellius © Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikipedia Commons
In place of pride, envy, covetousness, wrath and even lust (a weakness he put behind him in manhood), the emperor Vitellius espoused gluttony and sloth. This career flatterer, through whose veins coursed the blood of artisans, shopkeepers and ne’er-do-wells (a cobbler, a baker, an informer and a carpet-bagger), was of ‘an easygoing and lavish disposition’, ‘a kindly disposition’, ‘his nature... marked by simplicity and liberality’ – on this point conflicting sources agree.
His besetting sins, Suetonius tells us, ‘were luxury and cruelty’, a delight ‘in inflicting death and torture on anyone whatsoever and for any cause whatever’. The author provides examples but no names and few details, testimony that cannot be verified. Aside from the unedifying suggestion that Vitellius starved his mother to death in order to fulfil a trumpery prediction (not even the utterance of an oracle) ‘that he would rule securely and for a long time, but only if he should survive his parent’, there is more evidence of the former weakness than the latter. Undoubtedly he possessed a gift for tactlessness and blunt speaking, cruelty after a fashion. His dismissal of Otho’s unpretentious tomb – a small mausoleum for a small man – did not impress his contemporaries and continues to alienate modern readers. Ditto his tasteless statement on the battlefield of Otho’s defeat, rancid with forty-day-old unburied corpses, ‘that the odour of a dead enemy was sweet and that of a fellow citizen sweeter still’. Such lapses probably occupied him less than that addiction enumerated by Dio: luxury and licentiousness. His fecklessness took the form of prodigality, heedless of the economi
c depredations to Rome’s treasury of a year of civil war.
For reasons that do not survive, Vitellius was the first of Rome’s emperors to reject the senate’s award both of the title ‘Augustus’ and of the name ‘Caesar’.11 Instead, describing himself as ‘imperator’, he had assumed already the surname ‘Germanicus’, itself formerly in the gift of the senate. It was awarded by the army which had made him emperor – the legions of Upper and Lower Germany – and labelled him as surely as any brand applied to criminal or cattle.
Consistently denigrated by Flavian propaganda, Vitellius nevertheless does not rank high among the villains of imperial Rome: his indolence saw to that. Tacitus claims that ‘he was more than content to enjoy the present hour with no thought beyond’.1 It was a harmless inclination save in one entrusted with the direction of the world’s mightiest empire at a moment of danger and irresolution which demanded a second Augustus or at least a bureaucrat of Tiberius’ cool stamp. He was ‘naturally without energy’,2 politically moderate and entirely ignorant of military affairs – so far, remarkably like Otho. Most of all, he was consumed by the diktats of what Suetonius labels his ‘bottomless gullet’: more assiduous in pursuit of a full belly than in restoring Rome’s solvency, army discipline or senatorial morale; and too sluggish in his efforts to create a broad support base for his rule. Dio insists that he drained the treasury of 900 million sesterces, a suggestively exaggerated figure: in a period of civil unrest, all of it was spent on dinners. (A silver serving dish so large that a special furnace was built in open fields for its manufacture reportedly cost a million sesterces.)
By Roman standards he was tall. It was his sole eminence. His face was red with overindulgence, his body a bulging, bulbous excrescence. He walked with a limp, not on account of the burdens of obesity but thanks to a shattered thigh received in a chariot-race alongside the emperor Gaius. Hard to discern in the balloon-faced torpor of his portrait corpus the delicious young boy who had so tempted and delighted the ageing Tiberius that he earned the moniker ‘Sphinctria’, ‘sphincter artist’, a name that speaks for itself. It cannot have been an enviable youth, stained, as Suetonius describes it, ‘by every sort of baseness’. Perhaps an ambitious father put him up to it: certainly it was the career of Vitellius senior, called Lucius, which benefited in the first instance from his son’s hard submission on Capri. (Lucius Vitellius held three consulships under Claudius, with whom, like Otho’s father, he was closely associated. Such was the intimacy of emperor and senator that it was Lucius Vitellius who, alongside Narcissus, accompanied Claudius’ return to Rome after news emerged of Messalina’s ‘marriage’ to Silius.) Dio dismisses the seven months of Vitellius’ premiership as ‘nothing but a series of carousals and revels’.3 It is an echo of Tacitus’ taunt of living in the moment and suggests too something of that instinct for escapism which, discarding Nero, Romans had already decided did not fit the princeps’ part. We ought not to wonder that, after such a youth, Vitellius preferred to indulge different appetites: that he did so to the detriment of efficiency and clear-sightedness was a prescription for failure.
Vitellius’ violent death has a pathos absent from much of our chronicle. Like Galba and Otho before him, he achieved in death a fleeting greatness that was never his in life. At the eleventh hour, a fickle people deserted and derided this emperor who, when the going was good, possessed all the attributes of an affable bon viveur bar the mechanism that separates amiable indulgence from sickening excess. The people’s errant faithlessness was a repeating pattern in this year of conflict and armed uncertainty as Rome struggled to move forward in the vacuum following Nero’s suicide. Dragged through the city’s streets by soldiers, shabbily disguised and unwilling, Vitellius was exposed to the taunts and jeers of the mob. Their complaints were not political (hardly factional), not even economic. They reserved their scorn for his bodily defects. In this interlude when gamblers tossed for the highest stakes, the ordinary Roman did not revisit the protests of his forefathers, angered, for example, at Mark Antony’s offer to Caesar of a royal crown at the Festival of the Lupercalia: schoolboy derision replaced convictions. They pelted him with dung and shit. They called him ‘incendiary’ and ‘glutton’. They laughed at the wreckage of his huge physique. In vain this man who had made few claims for himself, attributing with injudicious candour the gift of empire to his troops, besought them, ‘And yet I was your emperor.’ They hacked his head from his body, severing for ever that supercharged alimentary canal. Then they hurled his body into the Tiber on a hook, much as butchers and fishmongers handle their wares, its cumbersome passage undoubtedly accompanied by further ribald laughter. The goddess Minerva, whom Vitellius had invoked as his protectress – and in whose name he once created a gastronomic extravaganza of stomach-churning ‘delicacy’, a ‘Shield of Minerva’ consisting of pheasant and peacock brains, pike livers, flamingoes’ tongues and lamprey milt, each ingredient shipped from the furthest frontiers of the Empire – declined to intervene either with omens or with obstacles.
In 1882 the unedifying spectacle of Vitellius’ last hours inspired the debut at the Paris Salon of a French history painter who would afterwards specialize in grandly scaled canvases of ancient brutality or classical titillation. So successful was Georges Rochegrosse’s horrible painting Vitellius Dragged through the Streets of Rome by the People that he reprised the composition two years later and won the prestigious Priz du Salon with his Andromaque, complete with severed heads, exposed breasts and lashings of blood. The action of both paintings centres on a staircase, down which protagonists tumble in angry cascade, faces taut, garbed in acrid shadows. Bound and captive, Andromache is locked in impassioned struggle. She gestures towards a baby, perhaps Astyanax, her son by Hector: she will never see the child again. In Vitellius’ case, all struggle is past. It is life itself which is being torn from him, but he musters no defiance. The huge emperor is tied with rope, trussed and criss-crossed with cords like an unwieldy sacrifice. His toga has fallen from his shoulders, his neck and face are flecked with blood. Passive and unprotesting, he awaits certain death with fear in his eyes and a blade rudely thrust beneath his chin. In its dark-hued viciousness, Rochegrosse’s unlovely image of vanished hope and mob misrule replicates the horror of the sources. ‘You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things! O you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome,’ Marullus admonishes the crowd in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar for their abandonment of Pompey. So it was with Vitellius. Perhaps in the emperor’s unseeing eyes is a glimmer of regret that troops once faithful to him had prevented his abdication, one of the sounder policies of his short, pointless principate.
It may have been an inevitable end for this good-time Roman who had been buggered by Tiberius, raced chariots with Gaius, gambled with Claudius and encouraged Nero in theatrical indignity, and whose popularity as princeps rested on his assiduous attendance at the theatre. No matter that he declined at first the title ‘Caesar’: Julio-Claudian credentials raised him up and dashed him down. The extravagance of his self-abandonment perpetuated into the next chapter of Rome’s imperial history the excess and extravagance of Augustus’ heirs. According to Dio, ‘He was insatiate in gorging himself, and was constantly vomiting up what he ate, being nourished by the mere passage of the food’,4 a process repeated three or four times every day with emetics and purges as necessary, each bowel-busting banquet billed at more than 400,000 sesterces. In 69, as Vespasian would show he had realized, prodigality was no longer the princeps’ proudest perquisite. Times had changed. Not Vitellius.
He was not, as we have seen, Rome’s first irresponsible emperor: Gaius and Nero were both fatigued by duty. Yet this ninth Caesar was the first to behave with consistent irresponsibility from a position of weakness. ‘He was never so absorbed in serious business that he forgot his pleasures,’ Tacitus tells us.5 The record of his reign suggests that he was seldom absorbed in serious business at all, devoted instead to a parody of good living, befuddled and queasy while his troops,
encamped on the banks of the Tiber, succumbed either to excess like his own or to dysentery, and distant armies mobilized in the name of Vespasian. A puppet of his legions, he may never have craved the throne. It was won for him in a single battle at which Vitellius himself was not present. But Otho’s surrender did not amount to conclusive military defeat: support remained for the three-month emperor among the population and military alike. ‘The soldiers of the Fourteenth legion were particularly bold,’ Tacitus records, ‘declaring that they had never been defeated.’6
Vitellius responded by ordering XIV Gemina Martia Victrix to Britain, a posting sufficiently remote to keep them from rabble-rousing in Rome; he also dispatched another troublesome legion, I Adiutrix, to Spain. In other instances he appeared unaware of that sense of irresolution which characterized the year’s third rapid-fire change of regime. The threat of the armies of the East left him apparently unconcerned – Dio describes him as going on ‘with his luxurious living’;7 so too stirrings of dissent on the Rhine, which in time increased in clamorousness. His focus was closer to home: the whirl of banquets and a new imperial guard which he formed after disbanding the Praetorians, elevating in their place 20,000 doughty German legionaries – too many soldiers in the city, badly disciplined and rapacious. When disaster threatened, he invoked the assistance of his cook and his pastry chef to smuggle him in a litter out of his besieged palace to safety.
The Twelve Caesars Page 21