Histories — Book 1

Tacitus · a new plain-English translation from the original language

1| My work begins with the second consulship of Servius Galba and Titus Vinius. The eight hundred and twenty years before them, from the founding of the city, found many historians, and as long as they wrote of the Roman people's affairs they matched them in eloquence and in freedom. But after the battle at Actium, when peace required that all power be concentrated in one man, those great talents vanished. Truth suffered in more ways than one: first from ignorance, since public affairs now felt like someone else's business; then from a taste for flattery, or else from hatred of the rulers. Neither camp cared about posterity — the hostile no more than the servile. But a writer's self-interest is easy to see through and dismiss; sneering and spite, on the other hand, find an eager audience. Flattery carries the ugly taint of servility, while malice wears a false face of independence. Galba, Otho, and Vitellius did me neither favor nor injury. My career, I won't deny, was begun under Vespasian, advanced under Titus, carried further still under Domitian — but a man who has pledged honest good faith must write of no one with love and of no one with hatred. If my life lasts, I have set aside the reign of the deified Nerva and the rule of Trajan for my old age — richer, safer material — for we now enjoy that rare good fortune of an age in which you may think what you like and say what you think.

2| The work I take up is rich in disasters, grim with battles, torn by rebellions, savage even in its stretches of peace. Four emperors died by the sword. There were three civil wars, more wars against foreign enemies, and often both kinds at once. Fortune smiled in the East and frowned in the West. Illyricum was in turmoil, the Gallic provinces wavered, Britain was conquered and then abandoned almost at once. The tribes of the Sarmatians and the Suebi rose against us; the Dacians won fame trading blows with us; even the Parthians nearly took up arms, made fools of by a fake Nero. And Italy itself was struck by disasters new or repeated after long ages of forgetting. Cities were swallowed by the sea or buried — the richest stretch of the Campanian coast. Rome was gutted by fires, her oldest shrines consumed, the very Capitol burned by the hands of its own citizens. Sacred rites were defiled, great adulteries committed; the sea was full of exiles, its rocks stained with the dead. In the city the cruelty ran even worse: noble birth, wealth, offices held or refused — all counted as crimes, and virtue was the surest road to ruin. The rewards paid to informers stirred as much hatred as their crimes, since some seized priesthoods and consulships as spoils of war, others provincial governorships and backstairs power, wrecking and upending everything out of hatred and dread. Masters found their own slaves bought off against them, and patrons their own freedmen; a man with no enemy could still be ruined by a friend.

3| Yet the age was not so barren of virtue that it produced no good examples. Mothers went with their children into exile; wives followed their husbands into banishment. Relatives showed courage, sons-in-law stood firm, and slaves kept faith even under torture that would not break. Great men faced their final necessity bravely, and matched in their deaths the celebrated deaths of the old Romans. Beyond the many blows that fell on human affairs, the sky and the earth both sent their warnings — portents, lightning-omens, signs of what was coming, some of them welcome, some grim, some murky, some unmistakable. Never has it been proved by crueler blows against the Roman people, or by clearer signs, that the gods care nothing for our safety, but a great deal for our punishment.

4| But before I set down what I mean to tell, it seems right to double back first: how did the city stand, what was the mood of the armies, how did the provinces lie, and where in the whole world was there health, where sickness — so that we understand not only the accidents and outcomes of events, which are mostly a matter of chance, but their reasoning and their causes. Nero's death, greeted at first with the raw joy of the moment, had stirred up all sorts of conflicting feelings — not only in the city, among the senate, the people, or the city garrison, but in every legion and every commander, once the secret of empire was out: that an emperor could be made somewhere other than Rome. The senate was delighted, and lost no time using its new freedom with a certain recklessness, since the new emperor was still far away. The leading knights shared in the senate's joy. The respectable part of the people, tied to the great households, felt the same; the clients and freedmen of the condemned and the exiled were roused to new hope. But the common rabble, devoted to the circus and the theaters, along with the worst of the slaves and those who had squandered their fortunes and now lived off Nero's shameful excesses, were gloomy, and hungry for rumors.

5| The city garrison, steeped for generations in loyalty to the house of the Caesars, had been led to abandon Nero more by scheming and pressure than by any impulse of its own; and now, learning that the donative promised in Galba's name would not be paid, and that in peacetime the same rewards and honors were not on offer as in war, and that the legions had gotten to the emperor's favor first, it was primed for revolution — stirred further by the crime of Nymphidius Sabinus, the Praetorian prefect, who was scheming to seize power for himself. Nymphidius was crushed in the very act, but though the head of the conspiracy was cut off, the guilty knowledge of it remained in the minds of most of the soldiers. Nor were there any lack of voices grumbling about Galba's old age and his stinginess. His severity, once praised and celebrated in his military reputation, now grated on men who despised the old discipline and had spent fourteen years under Nero learning to love the vices of their emperors no less than they had once respected their virtues. And Galba added a remark, honorable in principle, dangerous in practice: that he chose his soldiers, he did not buy them. The rest of his policies did not live up to that standard.

6| Galba was a frail old man, and Titus Vinius and Cornelius Laco — one the worst of men, the other the laziest — dragged him down, one weighed by hatred for his crimes, the other despised for his uselessness. His march on Rome was slow, and it left blood behind it: Cingonius Varro, consul-elect, and Petronius Turpilianus, a former consul, both died — Varro for backing Nymphidius, Turpilianus for having served among Nero's commanders — neither one heard, neither given any chance to speak in his own defense, innocent men though they were. His entry into the city, after the slaughter of so many thousands of unarmed soldiers, was a bad omen, and struck fear even into the men who had done the killing. A Spanish legion was brought in, while the one Nero had raised from the fleet remained; the city was crowded with an unfamiliar army. Many more troops besides came from Germany, Britain, and Illyricum — men Nero had picked out and sent ahead toward the passes of the Caspian for the war he was planning against the Albani, then recalled to crush Vindex's uprising. It was an enormous mass of material ready for revolution, not committed to any one man's cause, but ready for whoever dared seize it.

7| As it happened, news arrived at the same time of the deaths of Clodius Macer and Fonteius Capito. Macer, who was stirring up unmistakable trouble in Africa, was killed by the procurator Trebonius Garutianus on Galba's orders. Capito, attempting something similar in Germany, was killed by the legionary commanders Cornelius Aquinus and Fabius Valens before any order reached them. Some believed that Capito, foul and stained as he was by greed and lust, had nonetheless kept clear of any thought of revolution, and that when the commanders' urging to war failed to move him, they invented the charge and the plot themselves; and that Galba, either from natural inconstancy or to avoid digging deeper, approved what was done, since it could not now be undone. In any case both killings were badly received, and once a ruler is hated, whether his men act well or badly makes no difference — both bring equal resentment. Everything was for sale; his freedmen held excessive power; his slaves' hands grabbed greedily and hastily, as though hurrying to profit from an old man. The new court had the same vices as the old one, just as serious, and less excused. Galba's very age drew mockery and disdain from men used to Nero's youth, who compared emperors, as the crowd does, by looks and physical grace.

8| That, roughly, was the state of feeling at Rome — as much as feeling can be gauged in so vast a crowd. In the provinces: Spain was governed by Cluvius Rufus, a man of eloquence and skilled in the arts of peace, untested in war. The Gallic provinces, besides their memory of Vindex, were bound to Galba by the recent grant of Roman citizenship and by the future relief of tribute. But the Gallic communities nearest the German armies were not shown the same honor, and some even had territory taken from them; they measured others' gains and their own grievances with equal resentment. The German armies — the most dangerous thing, given their strength — were anxious and angry, proud of their recent victory and afraid that they had backed the losing side. They had been slow to abandon Nero, and Verginius had not moved for Galba right away; whether he had been unwilling to rule is uncertain, but it is agreed the soldiers had offered him the throne. Even those who could not complain of Fonteius Capito's death still resented it. There was no leader now, since Verginius had been recalled under the pretense of friendship; the men took his failure to be sent back, and his being treated as a suspect, as an accusation leveled at themselves.

9| The upper army despised its commander, Hordeonius Flaccus, weak with age and lame in the feet, without firmness or authority; even when the soldiers were calm he could not control them, and his very weakness in trying to restrain them made their fury worse. The legions of Lower Germany went a long time without a consular commander, until Galba sent Aulus Vitellius, son of the censor Vitellius who had been consul three times; that, it seemed, was recommendation enough. In the army of Britain there was no anger at all. Indeed no other legions behaved more innocently through all the upheavals of the civil wars, whether because they were cut off far away by the Ocean, or because frequent campaigns had taught them to save their hatred for the enemy. Illyricum too was quiet, though the legions Nero had called up from there had approached Verginius with delegations while they lingered in Italy. But armies separated by great distances — the surest safeguard for keeping military loyalty intact — were not drawn into either the vices or the strength of the others.

10| In the East, everything was still quiet. Licinius Mucianus held Syria and four legions—a man as famous for his failures as for his successes. As a young man he had cultivated influential friendships ambitiously. Then, his fortune worn down, his position shaky, and even Claudius's temper turned against him, he was banished to a remote corner of Asia—as near then to being an exile as he later was to being emperor. He was a mix of self-indulgence and energy, charm and arrogance, good qualities and bad. When he had nothing to do, his vices ran wild; whenever there was work to do, his virtues were considerable. In public you would have praised him; his private life was ill spoken of. But over his subordinates, his associates, his colleagues, he held power through all sorts of charms, and he was a man readier to hand over supreme command than to hold it himself. The Jewish war was being run by Flavius Vespasian, whom Nero had chosen to command it, with three legions. Vespasian had made no vow against Galba, harbored no grudge—in fact he sent Titus, his own son, to greet him and pay respects, a matter we shall take up later. We believe that the empire was destined for Vespasian and his sons by the hidden workings of fate, by omens and oracles—though we believe it only after the event proved it true.

11| Egypt and the forces that keep it in check have been held, ever since the deified Augustus, by Roman knights standing in the place of kings. This was thought the wise course: to keep in the emperor's own hands a province hard to reach, rich in grain, torn and volatile with superstition and license, ignorant of law, unfamiliar with regular magistrates. At this time it was governed by Tiberius Alexander, himself of that same people. Africa and its legions, after the killing of Clodius Macer, had taken a smaller master's lesson to heart, and would put up with any emperor now. As for the two Mauretanias, with Raetia, Noricum, and Thrace, and the other provinces run by procurators, whichever nearby army carried weight tipped them toward love or loathing accordingly. The unarmed provinces—Italy above all—lay exposed to whatever servitude was imposed on them, and would become the prize of whoever won the coming war. Such was Rome's condition on the day Servius Galba, now consul for a second term, and Titus Vinius began a year that was to be the last for them both—and very nearly finished the Republic too.

12| Only a few days into January, word came by letter from Pompeius Propinquus, procurator of Belgica: the Upper German legions had cast off the reverence owed their oath and were calling for a new emperor, though—to make the mutiny look less like one—they left the actual choice up to the senate and people of Rome. This news pushed forward a decision Galba had already been turning over for some time with his closest advisers—the question of adoption. Indeed no topic had been talked about more, all through those months, across the whole city: first out of sheer license and love of gossip, then because Galba was visibly failing with age. Few cared about sound judgment or love of the state; many, out of foolish hope, backed one man or another according as each man was a friend or a client, floating ambitious rumors—and some did it simply out of hatred for Titus Vinius, who grew more resented by the day in exact proportion as he grew more powerful. Galba's own easygoing nature only sharpened the greed of friends already hungry in the face of great fortune, since wrongdoing against a weak and trusting master carries less risk and greater reward.

13| Power under the new regime was split between Titus Vinius, the consul, and Cornelius Laco, prefect of the praetorian guard. Not far behind them in influence was Icelus, Galba's freedman, who had been given the equestrian ring and gone by the name Marcianus. These three did not get along, and each pursued his own interests in smaller matters, but on the question of choosing a successor they split into two camps. Vinius backed Marcus Otho; Laco and Icelus, in agreement for once, did not so much support anyone in particular as oppose Otho. Galba was well aware of the friendship between Otho and Titus Vinius, and rumor—which never lets anything pass in silence—had already marked the two out as father-in-law and son-in-law, since Vinius had a widowed daughter and Otho was unmarried. I believe, too, that Galba felt some concern for the state, reasoning it pointless to have taken the empire from Nero only to leave it to Otho. For Otho had spent his boyhood carelessly and his youth recklessly, and had won Nero's favor by rivaling him in extravagance. It was for this reason that Nero had entrusted him with Poppaea Sabina, his chief mistress, as a man in on the secret of his lust—until he could get rid of his wife Octavia. Later, suspecting Otho of designs on the same Poppaea, Nero packed him off to the province of Lusitania under the guise of a governorship. Otho ran the province decently, and was the first man of any standing to come over to Galba's side; he was far from idle, and while the war lasted he was the most dazzling figure among those present. The hope of adoption, conceived from the start, he pursued more and more eagerly by the day, backed by most of the soldiers and by Nero's old court, which naturally leaned toward a man so much like their former master.

14| But once Galba received word of the mutiny in Germany—though as yet nothing certain about Vitellius—he grew anxious about which way the armies' violence would break, and, not even trusting the city troops, he pushed through the choosing of an heir, which he thought the one remedy, he pushed through the formal process of choosing an heir. Along with Vinius and Laco he called in Marius Celsus, consul-designate, and Ducenius Geminus, prefect of the city. After a few words about his own old age, he ordered Piso Licinianus sent for—whether by his own choice, or, as some believed, at Laco's urging, who had cultivated a friendship with Piso through Rubellius Plautus. Laco was careful to promote him as a man he barely knew, and Piso's good reputation lent weight to the plan. Piso was the son of Marcus Crassus and Scribonia, noble on both sides, with the face and bearing of the old style—serious in the fair reading, gloomy in the unkind one. That very trait, which made suspicious minds uneasy, was exactly what recommended him to Galba as he chose.

15| So Galba, taking Piso by the hand, is said to have spoken to him in these terms: 'If I were adopting you as a private citizen, before the pontiffs by the customary formal law, it would already be a fine thing for me to bring the descendant of Gnaeus Pompeius and Marcus Crassus into my household, and a distinction for you to add the honors of the Sulpician and Lutatian houses to your own nobility. But as it is, called to power by the agreement of gods and men, it is your outstanding character and your love of country that move me to offer you—while you remain at peace—the supreme power our ancestors fought wars to win, and which I myself won by war. I follow the example of the deified Augustus, who lifted men one after another to the rank just below his own: Marcellus, his sister's boy, came first; Agrippa, his son-in-law, followed; then his own grandsons; and at the last, his stepson Tiberius Nero. But Augustus looked for a successor within his own house; I look within the state—not because I lack relatives or companions from the war, but because I did not seek power through ambition myself, and I want the proof of my judgment to include not only the claims of my own family, which I have set aside for you, but yours as well. You have a brother, equally noble, older than you, worthy of this fortune—were you not more worthy still. You are at an age that has already outgrown the appetites of youth, and your past holds nothing you need excuse. Until now you have known only adversity: success tests the spirit with sharper goads, for hardship can be endured, but good fortune corrupts. Loyalty, freedom, friendship—the finest goods of the human soul—you yourself will hold to with the same constancy, but others will wear them down through flattery. Sycophancy will force its way in, along with soft words and self-interest, the worst poison to genuine feeling. Even though you and I are speaking with complete honesty today, everyone else will prefer to talk with our position in life rather than with us directly—for persuading an emperor to do what is right takes real effort, while flattering any emperor at all takes none, and no real feeling.'

16| 'If the vast body of the empire could stand and balance itself without someone to steer it, I would have been a fit man for the Republic to begin again with. But we have come to a point now where the best gift my old age has left to give Rome is a worthy successor, and the best your youth can offer is to be a worthy emperor. Under Tiberius and Gaius and Claudius we were, in effect, the inherited property of a single family; now that the choice has begun to fall to us, it will stand in the place of freedom—and now that the house of the Julians and Claudians has ended, adoption will find the best man available. To be born and bred of an emperor is a matter of chance, and counts for nothing more; but the judgment involved in adoption is unclouded, and if you wish to choose, general agreement points the way. Keep Nero before your eyes—puffed up by the long line of Caesars behind him, and brought down not by Vindex with his unarmed province, nor by me with a single legion, but by his own monstrous cruelty and extravagance, pulled down by the weight of his own crimes on the public's neck. And there had been no precedent before that for condemning an emperor. We ourselves have been raised up by war and by the judgment of men who weighed our merits, and however outstanding we prove, we will draw envy for it. Still, do not be alarmed that two legions have not yet settled down, in the midst of this shaking of the whole world. I myself did not come to power under easy circumstances, and once word of your adoption is heard, I will stop being seen as merely an old man—which is the one thing held against me now. Nero will always be missed by the worst sort of people; it is up to you and me to see that he is not missed by the good as well. To advise you further would take more time than this moment allows, and my whole purpose is fulfilled if I have chosen you well. The most useful test of good and bad courses, and the shortest, is to ask yourself what you would have wanted, or not wanted, under a different emperor. For this is not, as in nations ruled by kings, a matter of one fixed household of masters and everyone else slaves: you will rule over men who can bear neither total slavery nor total freedom.' Galba spoke these words and others like them, as a man making an emperor; everyone else spoke to Piso as though the thing were already done.

17| They say Piso, from the moment eyes turned on him and then converged on him from every side, betrayed no sign of shock or elation. His words to his father and emperor were respectful, and about himself measured. Nothing in his face or bearing changed, as though he could command rather than merely wished to. They then debated whether the adoption should be proclaimed from the Rostra, in the senate, or in the camp. The camp won out: it would flatter the soldiers, whose favor, though ill-gotten by bribery and courting, was not to be scorned when won by honest means. Meanwhile the public had ringed the Palace, impatient for the great secret, and by half-suppressing the rumor only fed it.

18| On the tenth of January — a foul day of rain — thunder, lightning, and unusual portents from the sky threw everything into greater confusion. Custom held that this should call off any public business, but it did not stop Galba from going to the camp; he scorned such things as mere chance, or else believed that what fate has fixed cannot be avoided however plainly signaled. Before a packed assembly of soldiers he announced, with an emperor's brevity, that he was adopting Piso, following the example of the deified Augustus and the military custom by which one soldier chooses another. And so the mutiny would not be thought worse than it was by being passed over in silence, he volunteered that the Fourth and Twenty-Second legions, led astray by a few ringleaders, had gone no further than words and shouting, and would soon return to duty. He added no flattery to his speech, and no bribe. The tribunes, centurions, and the men nearest him answered with words pleasing to hear; the rest met it with gloom and silence, as if they had lost in war the donative that had become obligatory even in peacetime. It is agreed that their goodwill could have been won by even a modest show of generosity from the stingy old man. What hurt him was his old-fashioned rigor and a severity too strict for an age that can no longer match it.

19| Before the senate, Galba's speech was no more polished and no longer than it had been to the soldiers; Piso's was gracious. The senators' favor was plain to see — genuine in many, more lavish in those who had least wanted this outcome, and in the majority, the largest group, a compliant show of obedience while they pursued their own private hopes, indifferent to the public good. In the four days that followed, between the adoption and the murder, Piso said and did nothing else in public. As reports of the German revolt grew daily more frequent, and the city — ready as always to believe and accept any bad news — grew restless, the senators voted to send envoys to the army in Germany. It was debated privately whether Piso too should go, to lend the mission greater weight: the envoys would speak with the senate's authority behind them, Piso with the weight of the emperor's own name. A further motion called for Laco, the praetorian prefect, to travel with them too; he vetoed it. The envoys themselves — since the senate had been left the choice — were named, excused, replaced, in a shameful display of inconsistency, as fear or hope of staying or going moved each man.

20| The next concern was money. On close examination, the fairest solution seemed to be to reclaim it from wherever the shortage had come from. Nero had squandered two thousand two hundred million sesterces in gifts. Galba ordered each recipient summoned and made to return all but a tenth of what he had received. But even that tenth was barely left to most of them, since they had wasted other people's money as freely as their own, and the greediest and most dissolute among them had nothing left — neither land nor capital, only the tools of their vices. Thirty Roman knights were put in charge of the collection, a new kind of office, made burdensome by the intrigue and the sheer number of men involved. Everywhere the auctioneer's spear was up and property was sold off; the city was in constant turmoil over lawsuits. Yet there was real satisfaction that those Nero had given to turned out to be as poor as those he had robbed. During these days several tribunes were dismissed: from the praetorian guard, Antonius Taurus and Antonius Naso; from the urban cohorts, Aemilius Pacensis; from the watch, Julius Fronto. This did nothing to fix matters elsewhere, but only sowed fear — as if men were being purged one by one through cunning and intimidation, everyone grew suspicious.

21| Meanwhile Otho — who had no hope if things stayed settled, and everything to gain from chaos — was driven by many spurs at once: a taste for luxury burdensome even to an emperor, poverty scarcely bearable even for a private citizen, rage at Galba, envy of Piso. He even invented fears to sharpen his ambition: he had been too great a threat to Nero, he told himself, and could not face another exile like his time in Lusitania. Whoever is marked out as next in line is always suspected and hated by the man in power — that had already hurt him with an old emperor, and would hurt him more with a young one whose temper was savage and had grown feral through long exile: Otho could be killed. So he must act, and dare, while Galba's authority was still shaky and Piso's not yet solid. Times of upheaval offer their openings to great undertakings, and there was no room for delay, since inaction is more dangerous than recklessness here. Death comes equally to all by nature, but obscurity or fame among those who come after sets men apart; and if the same end awaits the guilty and the innocent alike, a man of spirit ought at least to deserve his death.

22| Otho's spirit was not soft to match his soft body. His closest freedmen and slaves, kept with a laxity worse than in any private household, kept dangling before him the court of Nero — its luxury, its adulteries, its scandalous marriages, all the other license of absolute power — presenting these, to a man greedy for such things, as his for the taking if only he dared, and as lost to him, reproachfully, while he sat idle. The astrologers pressed him too, insisting from their reading of the stars that a new upheaval was coming and that this would be Otho's banner year — a breed of men untrustworthy to the powerful, deceptive to the hopeful, one that in our society will always be banned and always be kept around. Poppaea's secret circle had employed many astrologers, the worst possible accessory to an emperor's marriage; among them was Ptolemy, who had accompanied Otho to Spain and had predicted he would outlive Nero. When events proved him right, he built on that credit — piecing together from guesswork and gossip, weighing Galba's old age against Otho's youth — to persuade him that he would be raised to power. Otho took the forecast as the fruit of expert skill and the warning of the fates, since it is human nature to believe more readily in what is obscure. And Ptolemy was there at his side, no longer just a fortune-teller but now an instigator of crime — a step easily taken from that kind of prophecy.

23| Whether the plan for the crime itself was long considered or sudden is uncertain. For a long time already Otho had been courting the soldiers' favor, whether hoping for the succession or preparing the deed, greeting the oldest veterans by name on the march, in camp, on guard duty, calling them comrades in memory of his days in Nero's entourage; recognizing some, asking after others, helping men with money or influence, and often slipping in complaints and pointed remarks about Galba, along with whatever else stirs up a crowd. The hardships of the march, the shortage of supplies, the harshness of the new regime were all felt more bitterly by men used to sailing the lakes of Campania and the cities of Greece, now struggling under arms across the Pyrenees, the Alps, and the endless stretches of road.

24| To soldiers whose passions were already burning, Maevius Pudens, one of Tigellinus's inner circle, added fuel like a torch. By drawing in the most excitable men, or those short of money and quick to reach for new ambitions, he gradually went so far that, under the guise of a dinner party, whenever Galba dined at Otho's house, he would hand out a hundred coins a head to the cohort standing guard. Otho then turned this seeming public generosity into something more, adding private gifts to individual men — so bold a corrupter that when Cocceius Proculus, one of the bodyguard, was in a boundary dispute with a neighbor, Otho bought the neighbor's entire property with his own money and gave it to him outright, thanks to the negligence of the prefect, who was blind to what was common knowledge just as much as to what was hidden.

25| Then Otho put one of his freedmen, Onomastus, in charge of the coming crime. Through him Barbius Proculus, watch-officer of the bodyguard, and Veturius, deputy of the same unit, were brought in; once Otho had tested them in wide-ranging conversation and found them shrewd and bold, he loaded them with money and promises, and gave them funds to sound out the loyalty of many more. Two ordinary soldiers took it upon themselves to transfer the rule of the Roman people — and they did transfer it. Only a few were let in on full knowledge of the plot; the wavering loyalty of the rest they worked on by different means — the leading soldiers through Nymphidius's old favors, which now made them objects of suspicion, the rank and file through anger and despair at the donative postponed so many times. Some were fired up by memory of Nero and longing for the old license; but all alike were gripped by a common fear of being reassigned to different units.

26| This rot infected the legions and the auxiliaries too, whose loyalty was already unsettled once word spread that the German army's allegiance was wavering. Mutiny was so ready to hand among the disaffected, and pretense so easy even among the loyal, that on the day after the Ides they were prepared to seize Otho as he returned from dinner — had they not feared the uncertainty of night, the soldiers' camps scattered across the whole city, and the difficulty of getting drunk men to agree on anything. It was not concern for the state — which they were sober enough to plan staining with their own emperor's blood — but fear that in the dark, whoever from the Pannonian or German armies happened to be met, since most of the men did not know each other, might be picked out as emperor in Otho's place. Many signs of the brewing mutiny were suppressed by those in on it; some reached Galba's ears, but the prefect Laco brushed them off — ignorant of the soldiers' true mood, hostile to any plan, however sound, that did not originate with him, and stubbornly at odds with anyone who actually knew the situation.

27| It was January 15th. Galba stood sacrificing before the temple of Apollo when the haruspex Umbricius announced that the entrails were unfavorable, that treachery was imminent, and that an enemy lurked within the household — Otho standing right there and listening, since he was next to the priest. He took this, on the contrary, as a good sign, promising for his own plans. Not long after, his freedman Onomastus told him he was expected by his architect and contractors — a prearranged signal that the soldiers were now gathering and the conspiracy was ready. When people asked why he was leaving, Otho invented a story about buying an old estate that needed inspecting first. Leaning on his freedman, he went through the Domus Tiberiana into the Velabrum, then on to the Golden Milestone by the temple of Saturn. There twenty-three bodyguards hailed him as emperor. He was alarmed at how few had turned out to greet him, and they hastily set him in a chair and rushed him off with drawn swords. Roughly the same number of soldiers joined along the way — some in on the plot, most out of astonishment, some shouting with swords raised, others silent, waiting to see how it turned out before committing themselves.

28| The tribune on duty in camp was Julius Martialis. Whether from shock at the scale of the sudden crime, or fear that the camp was more deeply corrupted than he knew and that resisting would mean his own death, he did nothing — and so gave most people the impression he was in on it. The other tribunes and centurions likewise chose the safety of the present moment over an uncertain course of honor, and this was the general mood: a few dared the worst crime, more wanted it done, and everyone let it happen.

29| Galba, meanwhile, knew nothing, absorbed in worship, wearing out the gods of a power no longer his. Then word arrived that some senator, no one knew who, was being dragged off to camp — soon it was clear the man being dragged off was Otho. From every corner of the city, as each messenger happened to meet him, reports came in — some exaggerating out of fear, a few playing it down below the truth, though even then people couldn't resist flattering him. In council it was decided to test the loyalty of the cohort standing guard at the Palace, but not through Galba himself, whose authority they wanted to keep intact for a greater crisis. Piso addressed the men, summoned before the palace steps, in these words: 'Six days ago, soldiers, not knowing what the future held — whether the name of Caesar was something to hope for or fear — I was adopted. What fate now awaits our house and the state lies in your hands. I say this not because I dread a harsher outcome for myself — having already known misfortune, I'm learning that good fortune, too, carries no less risk — but because I grieve for my father, for the senate, and for the empire itself, if we must either die today or, just as wretched in the eyes of decent men, kill. The one comfort we had after the recent upheaval was a city unstained by blood and a transfer of power without civil strife: the adoption seemed to guarantee that not even after Galba would there be room for war.'

30| 'I will claim no special nobility or restraint for myself; there's no need to compare my virtues against Otho's, since it's his vices alone he can boast of — vices that would have wrecked the empire even while he still played the emperor's friend. Would his walk, his bearing, his effeminate dress qualify him to rule? Those who mistake his extravagance for generosity are fooling themselves: that man knows how to squander, not how to give. Right now his mind is full of adulteries, drunken parties, gangs of women — these are what he thinks the rewards of power are, where the lust and pleasure are his alone and the shame and disgrace fall on everyone else. No one has ever exercised, by honest means, a power seized through crime. The consensus of the human race made Galba emperor; Galba, with your agreement, named me Caesar. If the state, the senate, and the people are empty names to you, then it matters to you, soldiers, that the worst of men not be allowed to make an emperor. Mutinies of legions against their commanders have happened before; but your loyalty and reputation have stayed unblemished to this day. Even Nero abandoned you — you did not abandon him. Shall fewer than thirty runaways and deserters — men no one would tolerate choosing their own centurion or tribune — now hand out the empire? Will you condone this precedent and, by staying silent, make the crime everyone's? This lawlessness will spread to the provinces, and while the crimes will fall on us, the wars that follow will fall on you. There is no more to be gained from killing an emperor than from sparing the innocent — you will receive exactly the same donative from us for loyalty as you would from others for treason.'

31| The bodyguards slipped away, but the rest of the cohort did not reject the speech. As happens in times of upheaval, they seized the standards more by chance than by any settled plan — not, as was later believed, through treachery and pretense. Marius Celsus was sent to the picked troops of the Illyrian army, camped in the Portico of Vipsania; the senior centurions Amullius Serenus and Domitius Sabinus were ordered to summon the German soldiers from the Hall of Liberty. The marine legion was distrusted, hostile over the killing of their comrades whom Galba had massacred right on his entry into the city. Cetrius Severus, Subrius Dexter, and Pompeius Longinus, the tribunes, likewise made their way to the Praetorian camp, in hopes that the mutiny, being still new and not yet fully grown, could be swayed toward wiser counsel. Subrius and Cetrius were met with threats and set upon by the soldiers; Longinus, however, they laid hands on and stripped of his weapons, because — not being one of their own officers but a friend of Galba's — his loyalty to his emperor made him more suspect to men now breaking away. The marine legion, without hesitation, joined the Praetorians; the picked troops of the Illyrian army drove Celsus off with leveled spears. The German detachments wavered a long time, their bodies still weak and their tempers calmed, since Galba had nursed them with special care after Nero sent them off to Alexandria and a long sickly voyage brought them back.

32| By now the whole populace filled the Palatine, a mix of slaves and free mingling their voices, demanding the death of Otho and his fellow conspirators as if calling for some spectacle in the circus or theater. They had no real judgment or honesty in it — the same people would demand the opposite with equal enthusiasm on the very same day — but they followed the age-old custom of flattering whoever holds power, through empty acclamations and pointless enthusiasm.

33| Meanwhile two opinions pulled Galba in different directions. Titus Vinius argued he should stay inside the palace, set the household slaves to guard it, secure the entrances, and not go out to face an angry mob: give time for wrongdoers to repent, time for loyal men to rally. Crimes, he said, gain strength from a sudden rush, good decisions from delay; besides, if reason called for it, he could still go out later, whereas retreat, once regretted, would no longer be in his own power.

34| The others thought speed was essential, before the still-weak conspiracy of a few could grow. Otho too would panic, they said — he had slipped away secretly and been carried off to men who barely knew him; by delaying and dawdling now he was only learning, too late, how to act like an emperor. They must not wait until the mutineers had organized their camp and stormed the Forum, with Galba looking helplessly on as they marched on the Capitol, while their splendid emperor and his brave friends barricaded the doorway of his own house — bracing, apparently, to sit out a siege. Fine help indeed to expect from slaves, if the unity of so vast a crowd, and that first surge of outrage — the most powerful force of all — were allowed to cool. Anything shameful, they argued, was also unsafe; and if death was inevitable, better to meet the danger head-on — that would make Otho more hated for it, and Galba's own men more honorable. Vinius argued against this view, and Laco turned on him with threats, egged on by Icelus, whose stubborn private grudge served the public ruin.

35| Galba hesitated no longer and gave in to those urging the bolder course. Still, Piso was sent ahead to the camp, being a young man of great name, recent popularity, and open hostility to Titus Vinius — whether deserved or simply because angry men wanted it that way; and hatred is always the easier thing to believe. Piso had scarcely left when a rumor spread — vague at first and unconfirmed — that Otho was dead, killed there in the camp. Then, as tends to happen with big lies, some people were soon swearing they had witnessed it with their own eyes, and the credulous story spread readily among a crowd eager to believe it and careless of checking. Many thought the rumor had been deliberately made up and spread by Otho's own partisans already mixed in the crowd, who had put the false good news about in order to lure Galba out.

36| Then it was not just the common people and the ignorant crowd bursting into applause and unrestrained enthusiasm, but many knights and senators too, casting off caution now that fear was gone, broke down the doors of the Palace and rushed in to show themselves to Galba, complaining that their revenge had been snatched away from them — the very men who were the most cowardly and, as events proved, would never have dared face real danger were now loudest in words and fiercest of tongue. No one actually knew anything, yet everyone swore to it, until Galba, worn down by the lack of any solid truth and swept along by the general delusion, put on a breastplate and, unable to stand against the surging crowd because of his age and frailty, was lifted up in his chair. He met the bodyguard Julius Atticus in the Palace, who showed him a bloody sword and shouted that he had killed Otho. 'Comrade,' Galba said, 'who gave the order?' — a remarkable spirit in checking military lawlessness, fearless before threats, incorruptible before flattery.

37| By now there was no doubt left in anyone's mind at the camp, and such was the enthusiasm that, not content with simply marching in ranks, they crowded onto the platform where Galba's golden statue had stood only a little before, and surrounded Otho with their standards right in the middle of the ranks. There was no room for tribunes or centurions to get near; the common soldiers even ordered that their own officers be watched closely. Everything rang with shouting, uproar, and men urging each other on — not like the vague, half-hearted flattery of an ordinary crowd, but as each newly arriving soldier came into view, they grabbed him by the hand, embraced him in full armor, set him beside them, led him in the oath, commending the emperor to the soldiers and the soldiers to the emperor by turns. Otho did his part too, stretching out his hands to bow to the mob, throwing kisses, playing the slave in every way to win mastery. After the entire marine legion had sworn the oath to him, trusting now in his strength, and thinking it best to fire up as a body those he had so far won over one by one, he began to speak like this before the camp's rampart.

38| 'I can't tell you what to call myself as I come before you, fellow soldiers. I can't call myself a private citizen, since you have named me emperor, and I can't call myself emperor while another man holds power. Even your own name will hang in doubt until it's decided whether you have the emperor of Rome in your camp, or an enemy. Do you hear that my execution and your punishment are demanded in the same breath? That's how plain it is: we can't perish and we can't be safe except together. And Galba, gentle as he is, has probably already promised it — the man who butchered thousands of the most blameless soldiers without anyone even asking him to. A shudder runs through me whenever I remember that deadly entrance of his, and that one victory of Galba's: ordering, in full view of the city, the decimation of men who had surrendered and been taken under his protection. Those were the omens under which he entered Rome. What has his reign brought us, in the way of glory, apart from a string of killings — Obultronius Sabinus and Cornelius Marcellus cut down in Spain, Betuus Cilo slain in Gaul, Fonteius Capito murdered in Germany, Clodius Macer in Africa, Cingonius killed on the road, Turpilianus within the city, Nymphidius in the very camp? What province anywhere, what camp, is not bloodied and stained — or, as he himself puts it, "corrected and reformed"? What others call crimes, he calls remedies, dressing things up with false names: severity for savagery, thrift for greed, and your executions and humiliations he calls discipline. Seven months since Nero's death, and Icelus has already stolen more than Polyclitus, Vatinius, and Aegialus together squandered. Had Titus Vinius worn the purple himself, his greed and his license would have run less wild — instead he treats us like his own chattel, and cheap chattel at that, as men belonging to somebody else are treated. That one household alone could cover the bonus that is never paid to you, and thrown in your faces every day.'

39| 'And so that there wouldn't even be hope left in Galba's successor, he fetched from exile a man he judged the very image of his own gloom and greed. You saw it yourselves, fellow soldiers — even the heavens, with a notable storm, turned against that ill-omened adoption. The Senate feels the same, the Roman people feel the same: your courage is what's waited for. In you lies all the strength behind honest resolutions, and without you the noblest of them are powerless. I'm not calling you to war, or to danger — every soldier's weapons are already on our side. A single toga-clad cohort isn't defending Galba now, only holding him in place; and once it catches sight of you, once it takes my signal, the only contest left will be who can claim the most credit with me. There's no room for hesitation in a plan that can only be praised once it's done.' Then he ordered the armory opened. Weapons were seized at once, with none of the order or method of proper soldiering — praetorian and legionary alike went unmarked by their own insignia, mixed in with auxiliary helmets and shields. No tribune or centurion urged them on; each man was his own leader and instigator. And the chief spur to the worst of them was the grief of the decent ones.

40| Piso, by now terrified by the roar of the swelling mutiny and by shouts echoing all the way into the city, finally reached Galba, who by then had quit the palace and was already close to the Forum. Meanwhile Marius Celsus was back, bearing news that was anything but reassuring. Some counseled returning to the Palatine, others taking the Capitol, most thought the speakers' platform should be seized; the majority simply argued against whatever others proposed — and, as happens in desperate councils, the best course always seemed to be the one whose moment had already passed. Laco is said to have considered killing Titus Vinius without Galba's knowledge, either to calm the soldiers' temper with his death, or because he believed him complicit with Otho, or in the end simply out of hatred. The time and place gave him pause, since once a killing begins it's hard to stop it, and the plan was thrown into confusion by panicked messengers and by those nearest fleeing — the enthusiasm of everyone who had at first eagerly shown loyalty and spirit now flagging.

41| Galba was dragged this way and that by the shifting surges of the crowd, the basilicas and temples filling up on every side — a grim spectacle. There was no voice from the people or the crowd, only stunned faces and ears straining toward every sound; not riot, not calm, but the silence peculiar to great fear and great rage. Word reached Otho, though, that the people were arming. He ordered his men to rush ahead and seize the danger first. And so Roman soldiers, looking for all the world as though they meant to tear Vologaeses or Pacorus down from the Arsacid throne of their forefathers — when in truth they were on their way to slaughter their own old, unarmed emperor — scattered the crowd, rode down senators, and stormed into the Forum, weapons bristling, horses at a gallop. Not even the sight of the Capitol, the sanctity of the looming temples, the emperors past and future, could deter them from a crime that whoever succeeds is bound to avenge.

42| When the armed column came into close view, the standard-bearer of the cohort escorting Galba — said to have been Atilius Vergilio — tore Galba's image from his standard and dashed it to the ground. That was the signal: every soldier's loyalty swung openly to Otho, the Forum emptied as the people fled, and swords were drawn against anyone who hesitated. Beside the Lake of Curtius, in the panic of the men carrying him, Galba was thrown from his chair and rolled onto the ground. His last words were reported differently, depending on whether the teller hated or admired him. Some said he asked, pleading, what wrong he had done, and begged a few days to pay the bonus; more said he offered his throat freely to the killers — let them do it, strike, if that was what the state required. It made no difference to the men killing him what he said. Who struck the blow isn't entirely certain: some say it was Terentius, a veteran recalled to service, others Laecanius; the more common story is that Camurius, a soldier of the Fifteenth Legion, drove his sword straight into his throat and cut it. The rest hacked savagely at his legs and arms — his chest was protected by armor — most of the wounds inflicted on the body only after it was already a headless trunk, out of sheer brutality.

43| Next they fell on Titus Vinius, and here too it's disputed whether terror simply choked off his voice, or whether he cried out that Otho had given no order for his death. Whether he invented that out of fear, or confessed by it his part in the conspiracy, his life and reputation lean more toward guilt — that he was in on the crime whose cause he had been. He fell in front of the Temple of the Divine Julius, struck first behind the knee, then run through both sides by Julius Carus, a legionary soldier.

44| Our own age saw one man distinguish himself that day: Sempronius Densus. A centurion of the praetorian cohort, assigned by Galba to guard Piso, he drew his dagger and rushed at the armed men, denouncing their crime, and by turning their blows onto himself — now with his hand, now with his voice — gave the wounded Piso a chance to escape. Piso made it into the Temple of Vesta, and was taken in out of pity by a public slave and hidden in his quarters; it was not sanctity or ritual but simply a hiding place that delayed his looming death, until Sulpicius Florus of the British cohorts — recently granted citizenship by Galba himself — and Statius Murcus, a scout, arrived, sent by Otho and burning to kill him by name. They dragged Piso out and cut him down in the temple doorway.

45| It's said Otho received no killing with greater joy, gazed on no severed head with such insatiable eyes — whether because his mind, for the first time freed of all anxiety, was only then beginning to make room for delight, or because the memory of Galba's dignity and of his own friendship with Titus Vinius troubled even his callous heart with a grim image, while Piso's death, as an enemy and rival, he believed he had every right, human and divine, to enjoy. Heads fixed on spears were carried among the cohorts' standards, alongside the legion's eagle, while the killers, and those who had merely been present, vied in displaying their bloody hands, boasting — truthfully or falsely — of it as a fine and memorable deed. Vitellius later found more than a hundred and twenty petitions asking for reward for some notable service that day; he ordered every one of the petitioners hunted down and killed — not out of honor for Galba, but by the custom handed down among emperors: protection for the present, vengeance for the future.

46| You would have thought it a different Senate, a different people. Everyone rushed to the camp, each trying to outrun his neighbor, racing those already ahead, cursing Galba, praising the soldiers' judgment, kissing Otho's hand — and the more false it all was, the more of it they did. Otho did not spurn any of them individually, restraining with voice and look the soldiers' greedy, threatening mood. They clamored for the execution of Marius Celsus, consul-designate and Galba's loyal friend to the very end, hating his diligence and honesty as if they were crimes. It was plain that this was the start of killing and plunder, aimed at destroying every decent man, but Otho did not yet have the authority to stop the crime — though he could already order one. So, pretending anger, he had Celsus put in chains, declaring he was reserved for worse punishments, and by that pretense rescued him from immediate death.

47| After that everything was done at the soldiers' discretion. They chose their own praetorian prefects: Plotius Firmus, once a rank-and-file soldier, later commander of the watch, who had backed Otho while Galba still lived; and, joined with him, Licinius Proculus, suspected of having fostered Otho's plans through close intimacy with him. As city prefect they installed Flavius Sabinus, following Nero's judgment, under whom Sabinus had held the same post — though most people saw in the choice a nod to his brother Vespasian. The soldiers demanded that the customary furlough fees paid to centurions be abolished, since the ordinary soldier had been paying them like an annual tax. A quarter of each company would be scattered on leave or wandering idle in camp, so long as it paid off its centurion, and no one cared how heavy the burden was or how it was raised: soldiers bought their leisure through banditry, theft, or menial labor. Meanwhile the wealthiest soldiers were worn down by hard labor and abuse until they could buy their exemption. Once his money ran out and, worse, his energy sagged with it, a man who had gone in rich and vigorous would return to the ranks poor and slack — only for another man, corrupted by the same poverty and license, to take his place. It was this cycle that drove men toward mutiny, discord, and finally civil war. But Otho, not wanting to alienate the centurions by currying favor with the rank and file, promised to pay the annual furlough fees from his own purse — a genuinely useful reform, later made permanent by good emperors for the sake of discipline. Laco the prefect, under the pretense of exile to an island, was run through by a veteran Otho had sent ahead to kill him. Marcianus Icelus, being only a freedman, was executed openly.

48| The day, spent in crimes, ended in something worse: rejoicing. The urban praetor convened the senate; the other magistrates competed in flattery; the senators came running. They voted Otho tribunician power, the name Augustus, and every honor of the principate, all striving to erase the insults and abuse they had flung at him not long before — though no one could tell whether any of it had actually stuck in his memory, or whether he had simply forgiven the offenses, or merely postponed them, given how short his reign would prove. Otho, carried across a Forum still soaked in blood, past the heaps of the slain, up to the Capitol and then to the Palace, allowed the bodies to be given burial and cremation. Piso was laid to rest by his wife Verania and his brother Scribonianus; Titus Vinius by his daughter Crispina — both families having to seek out and buy back the heads, which the killers had kept to sell.

49| Piso was completing his thirty-first year, a man of better reputation than fortune. Claudius had killed his brother Magnus; Nero had killed his brother Crassus. Piso himself had lived long in exile, then been Caesar for four days — adopted in haste and preferred over his elder brother for no purpose but to die before him. Titus Vinius lived fifty-seven years of mixed character. His father came from a praetorian family, his maternal grandfather from the proscribed. His first military service was disgraced: he served under the governor Calvisius Sabinus, whose wife, driven by a perverse urge to inspect the camp's layout, entered by night in soldier's dress, tried her hand at the sentry rounds and other military duties with the same wantonness, and dared to commit adultery inside the headquarters itself — and Titus Vinius was accused of being her accomplice in this. So by order of Gaius Caesar he was thrown into chains, then released when the times changed. His career afterward ran smoothly; after his praetorship he was given command of a legion and approved — until he was smeared with a slave's disgrace, accused of stealing a gold cup at a dinner of Claudius's, after which Claudius ordered that Vinius alone, of all the guests, be served from earthenware the next day. Yet as proconsul Vinius governed Gallia Narbonensis with strictness and integrity; then Galba's friendship dragged him to ruin. He was bold, shrewd, quick — and, depending on where he aimed his energy, either wicked or industrious with the same force. His will, given the size of his fortune, was voided; Piso's dying wishes were honored precisely because he had died poor.

50| Galba's body lay neglected for a long time, subjected to endless abuse in the license of darkness, until Argius, a steward and one of his old slaves, gave it humble burial in his own gardens. His head, stuck on a pole and mutilated by camp servants and grooms, was set up before the tomb of Patrobius — a freedman of Nero's whom Galba had put to death — and only found the next day, at last joined to the corpse already burned. So ended Servius Galba: across seventy-three years he lived under five emperors and prospered, faring better as another man's subject than ever he did as ruler himself. He came of old noble stock and great wealth; he himself had a middling character, more free of vices than possessed of virtues. He was neither careless of his reputation nor a self-promoter; he had no appetite for others' money, was frugal with his own, and stingy with the state's. Toward friends and freedmen, when he found good ones, he was tolerant without reproach; when they were bad, his blindness went as far as complicity. But the distinction of his birth and the fear of the times served as a cover, so that what was really sluggishness got called wisdom. While he was in his prime he won military renown in Germany. As proconsul he governed Africa with moderation, and, older now, held Hispania Citerior with the same fair justice — seeming greater than a private citizen while he remained one, and, by everyone's agreement, capable of ruling, had he never ruled.

51| The city, already trembling at the brutal crime just committed and at memories of Otho's old ways, was further terrified by fresh news of Vitellius — news that had been suppressed before Galba's murder, so that only the upper German army was believed to have revolted. Grief now spread openly, and not only among the senators and knights who had a real stake in the state's fortunes — ordinary people mourned too, seeing that two of the most shameless, cowardly, and dissolute men alive had, as if by some deliberate curse of fate, been chosen to bring the empire down. And it was no longer only the recent examples of a savage peace they recalled, but the old memory of civil wars: how the city had been captured so many times by its own armies, the devastation of Italy, the plundering of the provinces, Pharsalus, Philippi, Perusia, Mutina — names notorious for public disaster. They said that even when the fight over power was between good men, the world had nearly been overturned — yet empire had survived under Julius, had survived under Augustus as victor; the Republic would have survived under Pompey or Brutus. But now, would they go to the temples to pray for Otho, or for Vitellius? Both prayers were impious, both vows detestable, between two men of whose war the only certainty was that the winner would be the worse. Some began to guess at Vespasian and the armies of the East; and though Vespasian seemed preferable to either rival, people dreaded yet another war, yet more disaster. Reports about Vespasian were mixed — though he alone, of all the emperors before him, would prove to have changed for the better.

52| Now I will lay out the origins and causes of the Vitellian uprising. After Julius Vindex had been crushed along with all his forces, the army — flushed with plunder and glory, as if it had won the richest of wars without effort or danger — preferred campaigning and battle to garrison pay. They had long endured a hard, unrewarding service, owing to the harshness of the region and climate and to the severity of discipline — a discipline unbearable enough in peacetime, and now dissolved by civil discord, with agents of corruption ready on both sides and treachery going unpunished. They had men, weapons, and horses enough, for use and for show. But before the war they had known only their own centuries and squadrons; the armies were kept apart by provincial boundaries. Then, mustered against Vindex, the legions had tested their strength against both themselves and the Gallic provinces, and now sought fresh weapons and fresh quarrels — no longer calling the Gauls allies, as before, but enemies and the conquered. Nor was there any lack of support from the part of Gaul bordering the Rhine, which had taken the same side and now proved the fiercest instigator against the 'Galbans' — the name they had coined once Vindex fell out of favor. So, hostile first to the Sequani and Aedui, and then, in proportion to each community's wealth, to others in turn, they set their minds on storming towns, ravaging farmland, and plundering households — driven not only by greed and arrogance, the besetting vices of the strong, but further provoked by Gallic defiance, since the Gauls kept boasting of the quarter of their tribute Galba had remitted and of the public gifts they had received, to the army's disgrace. There was also the rumor, cleverly spread and recklessly believed, that the legions were to be decimated and their most capable centurions dismissed. From every side came grim reports and ill omens out of the city; the colony of Lugdunum, hostile to Galba's party and stubbornly loyal to Nero's memory, was a rich source of rumors. But the greatest material for invention and belief lay in the camp itself, bred of hatred, fear, and — once the soldiers had counted their own strength — a reckless sense of security.

53| Right around the first of December the previous year, Aulus Vitellius had entered Lower Germany and gone to work carefully on the legions' winter camps: ranks were restored to many, disgrace lifted, black marks erased. Some of this was favor-currying, some was sound judgment—in particular he had honestly reversed the corrupt, grasping decisions Fonteius Capito had made in stripping or granting military rank. None of it was read as the ordinary conduct of a consular governor; everything was taken as something greater. Where strict men saw Vitellius as beneath his station, his admirers called it warmth and generosity—that he gave away his own money without limit or judgment, and other people's just as freely. And their own itch to see him rule made them read his very vices as virtues. Both armies were full of men who were, alongside the quiet and disciplined, corrupt and reckless. But it was the legionary commanders Caecina and Fabius Valens who stood out for extravagant ambition and glaring recklessness. Valens, furious at Galba—he felt he'd gotten no thanks for exposing Verginius's hesitation and crushing Capito's schemes—began stirring up Vitellius, pointing to the troops' enthusiasm: Vitellius's name, he said, was famous everywhere, while Hordeonius Flaccus would put up no resistance; Britain would come over, the German auxiliaries would follow; the provinces were unreliable, an old man's rule was fragile and would soon pass anyway—Vitellius need only open his arms and step forward to meet Fortune as she came. Verginius, he said, had been right to hesitate: son of an unknown father, from an equestrian family, he'd have been unequal to power if he'd taken it, but safe if he refused it. Vitellius was different—his father's three consulships, his censorship, his partnership in office with a Caesar, had already conferred on him the standing of an emperor, and stripped him of the safety of private life. These arguments worked on a sluggish nature, stirring him to want the throne more than to actually hope for it.

54| Meanwhile in Upper Germany, Caecina—handsome, young, a huge man, reckless in spirit, sharp-tongued, carrying himself proudly—had won over the troops. Galba had made this young man, a quaestor in Baetica who had switched to his side without hesitation, commander of a legion; then, on discovering he had embezzled public funds, ordered him prosecuted for theft. Caecina took this badly, and decided to throw everything into confusion and cover his private injuries with public disaster. Nor did the army lack seeds of discord: it had gone into the war against Vindex as a united force, and had only been transferred to Galba's side after Nero's death—and even then, the standards of Lower Germany had beaten them to the oath. The Treviri and Lingones, and other communities Galba had crushed with harsh edicts or territorial losses, mixed freely with the legions' winter quarters nearby, and this bred seditious talk; among civilians the soldiers grew more corrupted still, and sympathy for Verginius—which would have helped any other candidate—only added fuel.

55| The Lingones, following an old custom, had sent the legions gifts of clasped right hands, the token of hospitality. Their envoys, dressed in mourning and grief, moved through headquarters and barracks, complaining now of their own wrongs, now of the rewards given to neighboring communities, and—wherever soldiers' ears were receptive—stoking anger by dwelling on the army's own dangers and humiliations. They were not far from provoking mutiny when Hordeonius Flaccus ordered the envoys to leave, and to make their departure less conspicuous, had them go by night. This produced an ugly rumor: many insisted they had been killed, and that unless the boldest soldiers looked out for themselves, they too would be murdered in the dark by ignorant hands, just for having complained about present conditions. The legions bound themselves together in a silent pact; the auxiliary troops were drawn in too—suspected at first, since it looked as though cohorts and cavalry wings were being positioned to encircle and attack the legions, then, turning the same fear over more fiercely, drawn into the plot itself. Bad men find it easier to agree on war than good men do on peace.

56| The legions of Lower Germany were still made to take the customary oath to Galba on the first of January, though only after much hesitation, with a few of the senior centurions speaking up while the rest kept silent, each waiting to see how bold his neighbor would be—it is human nature to rush toward what one was reluctant to begin. But even within the legions themselves feelings differed: the First and Fifth were so unruly that some men threw stones at Galba's images; the Fifteenth and Sixteenth did no more than grumble and threaten, watching for someone else to make the first move. In Upper Germany, though, the Fourth and Twenty-Second legions, quartered together, tore down Galba's images on New Year's Day itself—the Fourth eagerly, the Twenty-Second more hesitantly, then in agreement. To avoid seeming to throw off all respect for imperial authority, they swore instead to that long-forgotten pair, the Senate and the Roman People—no officer or tribune pushing for Galba, though some, as happens in chaos, made themselves conspicuous by stirring things up. Still, no one spoke as if addressing an assembly, or from a platform—there was as yet no one to credit for it.

57| Hordeonius Flaccus, the consular governor, stood by and watched the outrage—too weak to hold back the reckless, too weak to steady the wavering, too weak to encourage the loyal; sluggish, timid, innocent only through inertia. Four centurions of the Twenty-Second—Nonius Receptus, Donatius Valens, Romilius Marcellus, Calpurnius Repentinus—were seized and put in chains by the soldiers' violence while trying to protect Galba's images. No one any longer kept faith with, or even remembered, the earlier oath. As happens in mutinies, whichever side had the greater numbers became everyone's side.

58| On the night after New Year's Day, while Vitellius was at dinner in Cologne, the standard-bearer of the Fourth Legion brought him news: the Fourth and Twenty-Second had thrown down Galba's images and sworn to the Senate and People of Rome. That oath looked hollow. It seemed the moment to seize a wavering fortune and put forward a candidate. Vitellius sent men to the legions and their commanders announcing that the army of Upper Germany had broken with Galba; therefore either they must fight the rebels, or, if peace and unity were preferred, they must make an emperor—and it was less risky to accept one than to go looking for one.

59| The winter camp of the First Legion was nearest, and Fabius Valens was the most eager of the commanders. The next day he entered Cologne with the legion's cavalry and auxiliary horse and hailed Vitellius as emperor. The legions of the same province followed, with tremendous enthusiasm; and on the third of January the army of Upper Germany dropped its high-sounding talk of Senate and Roman People and went over to Vitellius—proof enough that for the two days before, they hadn't really been thinking about the state at all. The people of Cologne, the Treviri, and the Lingones matched the army's fervor, offering troops, horses, arms, and money, each according to his strength, resources, and ingenuity. It wasn't only the leading men of the colonies and camps—who had great hopes from present abundance and an assured victory—but the rank and file too, ordinary soldiers, who handed over their travel funds, their belts, and their silver-decorated harness ornaments in place of coin, driven by impulse, momentum, and greed.

60| So Vitellius, praising the soldiers' enthusiasm, replaced the freedmen who usually ran the imperial administration with Roman knights, paid centurions' exemption fees out of the treasury, and again and again approved the savagery of soldiers demanding executions, only rarely tricking them out of a victim by pretending to have him imprisoned instead. Pompeius Propinquus, procurator of Belgica, was killed at once; Julius Burdo, prefect of the German fleet, he cunningly spirited away. The army's fury had been kindled against Burdo for allegedly framing, then plotting against, Fonteius Capito. Capito's memory was fondly kept, and among men in this kind of rage, killing openly was easy, but pardoning could only be done by deception—so Burdo was kept under guard and released only after the victory, once the soldiers' hatreds had cooled. Meanwhile a centurion named Crispinus was thrown to them as a scapegoat—he had stained his own hands with Capito's blood, which made him both an obvious target for the soldiers' demands and cheap enough for Vitellius to sacrifice.

61| Julius Civilis was next rescued from danger—he held great sway among the Batavians, and there was fear that punishing him would alienate that fierce people. There were, in the territory of the Lingones, eight cohorts of Batavians, auxiliaries of the Fourteenth Legion, who had split off from the legion amid the general turmoil; depending on which way they leaned, they carried real weight either for or against the cause. Vitellius ordered the execution of the centurions Nonius, Donatius, Romilius, and Calpurnius, mentioned above, convicting them of loyalty—the gravest possible charge among rebels. Valerius Asiaticus, governor of Belgica, whom Vitellius soon made his son-in-law, joined the cause, as did Junius Blaesus, governor of Gallia Lugdunensis, bringing the Italian legion and the Tauriana cavalry wing stationed at Lyon. Nor was there any delay before the forces in Raetia joined as well; even in Britain there was no hesitation.

62| The governor there was Trebellius Maximus, held in contempt and hated by the army for his greed and corruption. His unpopularity was fed by Roscius Coelius, commander of the Twentieth Legion, long at odds with him—but the chaos of civil war let their quarrel erupt more viciously than before. Trebellius accused Coelius of stirring mutiny and wrecking discipline; Coelius accused Trebellius of plundering and impoverishing the legions. Amid this ugly feuding between commanders, the army's discipline broke down, and things went so far that Trebellius, jeered even by the auxiliary troops and abandoned as cohorts and cavalry wings flocked to Coelius, fled to Vitellius. The province stayed quiet despite losing its governor: the legionary commanders ran it, equal in legal authority, though Coelius held more real power through sheer boldness.

63| With the British army now added to his side, Vitellius—formidable in manpower and resources—assigned two commanders and two lines of advance for the war: Fabius Valens was to win over the Gallic provinces, or ravage them if they refused, and break into Italy by the Cottian Alps; Caecina was ordered to take the shorter route, descending by the Pennine passes. Valens was given picked troops from the army of Lower Germany, along with the eagle of the Fifth Legion and various cohorts and cavalry wings—some forty thousand armed men in all; Caecina led thirty thousand out of Upper Germany, the core of them the Twenty-First Legion. German auxiliaries were added to each force, and from them Vitellius also reinforced his own reserves, intending to follow behind with the full weight of the war.

64| A strange contrast between the army and its commander: the soldiers pressed forward, demanding weapons, while the Gauls trembled and the Spanish provinces hesitated—winter was no obstacle, nor the delays of a slack peace. Italy must be invaded, Rome seized: in civil war nothing is safer than speed, where action matters more than deliberation. Vitellius lay idle, savoring in advance the fortune of the principate through lazy luxury and extravagant feasts, drunk by midday and heavy with gorging, while the fire and drive of his soldiers took over the general's duties on their own, as if their commander were present, spurring the eager and the reluctant alike with hope or fear. Drawn up and eager, they demanded the signal to march. The name Germanicus was tacked onto Vitellius at once; even in victory he refused to be called Caesar. A happy omen came to Fabius Valens and the army he was leading to war: on the very day they set out, an eagle flew gently ahead of the column, as if guiding the march, matching its pace to theirs. So long and so joyful was the soldiers' shouting, so calm the fearless bird, that no one doubted it was a sign of a great and prosperous outcome.

65| They approached the Treveri without concern, as allies. But at Divodurum, a town of the Mediomatrici, though the people received them with every courtesy, a sudden panic seized the troops. They grabbed their weapons on the spot to massacre an innocent population—not for plunder or the itch to loot, but out of a wild, unreasoning fury, all the harder to check for having no clear cause. Only the general's pleas checked them short of destroying the town, but still some four thousand people were killed. The terror spread through Gaul, so that as the column advanced, whole communities came out to meet it with their magistrates and prayers, their women and children lying prostrate in the roads—and every other appeal that might soften an enemy's rage, offered up not in war but simply to keep the peace.

66| Fabius Valens received news of Galba's murder and Otho's accession while among the Leuci. It stirred no joy or fear in his soldiers' hearts—they were still turning war over in their minds. For the Gauls, hesitation vanished: they hated Otho and Vitellius equally, but feared Vitellius as well. Next came the territory of the Lingones, loyal to the Vitellian cause. They were welcomed warmly and vied with the troops in good behavior, but the joy was short-lived, spoiled by the unruliness of the cohorts that Fabius Valens had detached from the Fourteenth Legion, as mentioned earlier, and attached to his own army. Quarrels broke out first between the Batavians and the legionaries, then outright brawling, as each side gathered its own partisans, and it nearly came to open battle—until Valens punished a few offenders and reminded the Batavians, who had all but forgotten military discipline, of their obligations. A pretext for war was sought against the Aedui, but in vain: ordered to hand over money and weapons, they threw in free supplies besides. What the Aedui did from fear, the people of Lyon did gladly. But the Italian Legion and the Tauriana cavalry wing were withdrawn from Lyon; the Eighteenth Cohort was left there, in its usual winter quarters, as agreed. Manlius Valens, commander of the Italian Legion, despite having served the Vitellian cause well, received no honor from Vitellius: Fabius had slandered him behind his back, all the while praising him openly, so that he would be caught off guard, unsuspecting.

67| An old rivalry between Lyon and Vienne had been rekindled by the recent war. Each side had inflicted losses on the other, more frequent and bitter than could be explained simply by the fighting over Nero and Galba. Galba, seizing on his anger as the occasion, had diverted Lyon's revenues into the imperial treasury, while showing great favor to Vienne—hence the rivalry, the resentment, and, with only a river between them, a hatred that linked the two towns. So the people of Lyon set about stirring up individual soldiers, pushing them toward the destruction of Vienne—recalling how their own colony had been besieged by the Viennese, how they had aided Vindex's efforts, and how they had lately enrolled legions to garrison Galba's cause. Having laid out their grievances, they dangled the size of the plunder before the soldiers—no longer whispered encouragement now, but open public pleading: go as avengers, they said, wipe out this nest of Gallic rebellion; everything there is foreign and hostile; don't abandon us—a Roman colony, part of your own army, partners in your fortunes good and bad, to their fury if the tide should turn against you.

68| These arguments and many more in the same vein had so worked on the soldiers that not even the officers and commanders of the party thought the army's fury could be put out. Aware of their own peril, the people of Vienne, carrying olive branches and the sacred fillets of suppliants, met the advancing column, clutching at weapons, knees, and footsteps, and so turned the soldiers' hearts; Valens added three hundred sesterces per man as further persuasion. Then the antiquity and standing of the colony carried weight, and Fabius's words in support of the safety and preservation of Vienne fell on receptive ears. Still, the town was formally stripped of its weapons, and private citizens contributed provisions of every kind to help supply the soldiers. But it was widely and steadily rumored that Valens himself had been bought off with a great sum of money. Long known for shabby means, he had suddenly grown rich, and hid the change in his fortunes badly—his appetites, sharpened by long poverty, now knew no bounds, an old man made prodigal by a youth spent in want. The army then advanced by slow marches through the territory of the Allobroges and the Vocontii, the commander himself turning each day's route and the pick of campsites into merchandise, squeezing corrupt payoffs out of landowners and town magistrates—so openly threatening that he set torches to the town of Luc (a municipality of the Vocontii) until he was bought off with money. And whenever money ran short as a bribe, he let himself be appeased with seduction and adultery instead. So they came at last to the Alps.

69| Caecina drew more blood and plunder still. His already turbulent temper had been provoked by the Helvetii, a Gallic people once famous for arms and manpower, and still known by reputation, though they knew nothing of Galba's murder and refused to accept Vitellius as emperor. The war began with the greed and haste of the Twenty-First Legion, which seized money meant to pay the garrison of a fort that the Helvetii had long guarded and paid for with their own soldiers. The Helvetii, deeply resentful, intercepted letters being carried in the name of the army of Germany to the Pannonian legions, and held a centurion and some of the soldiers under arrest. Caecina, hungry for war, moved to punish every offense the moment it occurred, before there was time for regret: camp was struck at once, the fields laid waste, and a place built up over a long peace into something like a town, popular for its pleasant hot springs, was plundered. Messengers were sent to summon the Raetian auxiliaries to attack the Helvetii from the rear once they turned to face the legion.

70| The Helvetii, bold before the danger came, grew fearful once it arrived. Though in the first confusion they had chosen Claudius Severus as their leader, they did not know how to handle weapons, keep formation, or agree on any single plan. A battle against veteran troops was ruinous; a siege was hopeless too, their walls crumbled with age. On one side stood Caecina with a strong army; on the other, the Raetian cavalry and cohorts and the young men of Raetia itself, trained to arms and accustomed to military discipline. Everywhere there was ravaging and slaughter: the Helvetii themselves wandered aimlessly, weapons thrown aside, many wounded or scattered, and fled to Mount Vocetius. A cohort of Thracians was sent in at once and drove them off; Germans and Raetians hunted them down, cutting them apart through the woods and wherever they had gone to ground. Thousands upon thousands died; thousands upon thousands more were dragged off into slavery. When, with everything else destroyed, the army marched in force on Aventicum, the tribal capital, envoys were sent to surrender the town, and the surrender was accepted. Caecina put to death Julius Alpinus, one of the leading men, as the instigator of the war; the rest he left to Vitellius's mercy or cruelty.

71| It's hard to say whether the Helvetian envoys found the emperor or his soldiers less willing to be appeased. The soldiers demanded the destruction of the whole people, brandishing weapons and fists in the envoys' faces. Even Vitellius did not hold back his words and threats—until Claudius Cossus, one of the envoys, a man of known eloquence, masked his skill in speaking behind a show of fitting anxiety, which made him all the more persuasive, and calmed the soldiers' temper. As is the way with a crowd, fickle and given to sudden shifts, they were as quick to pity now as they had been extreme in cruelty before. Weeping freely and pressing their better case with steady insistence, the envoys won pardon and safety for their people.

72| Caecina spent a few days among the Helvetii waiting for word of Vitellius's decision, while also preparing to cross the Alps, when he received welcome news from Italy: the Silian cavalry wing, stationed along the Po, had sworn allegiance to Vitellius. The Silians had known Vitellius as proconsul in Africa; later summoned by Nero to be sent ahead into Egypt, then recalled because of the war with Vindex, they had remained in Italy, and now, urged on by their squadron commanders—who knew nothing of Otho but were bound to Vitellius—they were swayed by the strength of the approaching legions and the reputation of the army of Germany, and went over to his side. As a kind of gift to the new emperor, they brought with them the strongest towns of the region beyond the Po: Milan, Novara, Ivrea, and Vercelli. Caecina learned of this directly from the men themselves. Since the greater part of Italy could not be defended by the garrison of a single cavalry wing, he sent ahead cohorts of Gauls, Lusitanians, and Britons, and detachments of Germans along with the Petriana cavalry wing. He himself hesitated briefly over whether to turn through the Raetian mountains into Noricum against the procurator Petronius Urbicus, who had called up auxiliary troops and broken down the river bridges, and was thought loyal to Otho. But fearing he might lose the cohorts and cavalry already sent ahead, and calculating too that holding Italy would bring the greater glory—besides, wherever the decisive fighting fell out, Noricum would end up swept in among the victor's other spoils regardless—he led his infantry reserves and the heavy column of the legions over the Pennine Pass, through Alps still deep in winter snow.

73| Meanwhile Otho, against everyone's expectation, did not sink into indulgence or idleness. He put off his pleasures, hid his taste for luxury, and arranged everything to look the part of an emperor — and that only made him more alarming, since virtues that were false and vices bound to return are always more frightening than open ones. He ordered Marius Celsus, the consul-designate, brought up to the Capitol — Celsus had only been kept chained for show, to shield him from the soldiers' fury — and there, at the cost of a man both famous and loathed within his own party, Otho angled for a name for mercy. Celsus openly admitted the charge: that he had stayed loyal to Galba. He turned it into a badge of honor rather than a confession. Otho did not act as though forgiving him; instead he called on the gods to witness their reconciliation, took him at once among his closest friends, and later chose him as one of his commanders in the war. To Celsus it seemed almost fated: his loyalty stayed intact and unlucky even under Otho. His survival pleased the leading men of the state, was celebrated by the common people, and even the soldiers were not sorry for it — they admired in him the very quality that had made them furious with him before.

74| An equal but very differently caused rejoicing followed the killing of Tigellinus, which the crowd had demanded and got. Ofonius Tigellinus, born of obscure parents, filthy in his boyhood, shameless in his old age, had won command of the night watch and of the praetorian guard — and other rewards usually earned by virtue — through vice instead, because that was the quicker road. He went on to practice cruelty, then greed, then crimes fit for a man, corrupting Nero to every kind of outrage, daring some things Nero never knew about, and finally deserting and betraying him. For that reason no one was demanded for punishment more insistently than he was — by people moved by opposite feelings, some out of hatred for Nero, some out of longing for him. Under Galba he was protected by the influence of Titus Vinius, who claimed Tigellinus had once saved his daughter. He had indeed saved her — not out of mercy, since he had killed so many others, but as insurance for the future; for the worst men, distrusting the present and dreading change, are always buying private favor against public hatred. So it was never innocence he cared about, only immunity in turn. This made the people angrier still, and the old hatred of Tigellinus was sharpened by fresh resentment of Titus Vinius. They swarmed from every part of the city into the Palace and the forums, and, wherever the mob has the most license, poured into the circus and theaters, shouting seditious slogans, until Tigellinus, receiving news at the springs of Sinuessa that his final hour had come, fouled his already infamous life with a death as late and as shameful as the rest of it — cutting his throat with a razor amid the kisses and embraces of his mistresses, dragging the act out in disgusting delay.

75| Around the same time Calvia Crispinilla was called to account and demanded for punishment, but escaped the danger through various evasions and because the emperor pretended not to notice — his reputation suffered for it. She had been the tutor of Nero's vices, had crossed to Africa to stir up Clodius Macer to rebellion, and had worked, none too subtly, to starve the Roman people. Yet afterward she won the goodwill of the whole state, propped up by a consular marriage, and remained untouched under Galba, Otho, and Vitellius alike — later powerful again through money and childlessness, both of which count equally in good times and bad.

76| Meanwhile letters passed frequently between Otho and Vitellius, laced with flattery fit for courting a woman, offering money, favor, and any quiet retreat Vitellius might choose for a life of extravagant ease. Vitellius made the same kind of offers in return — at first with some restraint, in a foolish and undignified pretense on both sides — but soon, as if quarreling, they began hurling each other's sexual scandals and crimes back and forth, and neither one was lying. Otho recalled the envoys Galba had sent out and dispatched them again, in the Senate's name, to both German armies, to the Italian legion, and to the forces stationed at Lyon. The envoys stayed on with Vitellius — too readily for it to look like they'd been detained. The praetorian soldiers Otho had attached to them as a show of courtesy were sent back before they could mix with the legions. Fabius Valens, writing in the German army's name, sent letters of his own to the praetorian and city cohorts, boasting of his party's strength and offering reconciliation — while pointedly reproaching them, too, for handing the empire over to Otho when it had long since been given to Vitellius.

77| So both sides tried to win over the troops with promises and threats together — on the grounds that they were no match in war and would lose nothing by peace — yet none of this shook the loyalty of the praetorians. Still, assassins were sent by Otho into Germany and by Vitellius into Rome. Both attempts failed, but Vitellius's men escaped without harm, since in a city of such size men could deceive each other simply through mutual anonymity; Otho's agents were betrayed by their unfamiliar faces, in a camp where everyone knew everyone. Vitellius wrote to Titianus, Otho's brother, threatening death to him and his son unless Vitellius's own mother and children were kept safe. Both households survived — under Otho perhaps out of fear; Vitellius, as the eventual winner, got the credit for mercy.

78| The first thing to give Otho confidence was news from Illyricum that the legions of Dalmatia, Pannonia, and Moesia had sworn allegiance to him. The same news came from Spain, and Cluvius Rufus was praised in an official edict — but it was soon learned that Spain had already gone over to Vitellius. Even Aquitania, though bound to Otho's cause by Julius Cordus, did not stay loyal long. Nowhere was there real loyalty or affection: provinces swung one way and another out of fear and necessity. The same dread turned the province of Narbonensis to Vitellius, since it was an easy crossing to the armies nearest and strongest. The distant provinces, and whatever forces were separated by sea, remained with Otho — not from devotion to his cause, but because the name of Rome and the pretext of the Senate carried real weight, and because he had been the first one they heard of. Vespasian brought the army in Judea, and Mucianus the legions of Syria, to swear the oath to Otho; at the same time Egypt and all the provinces turned toward the East were held in his name. Africa fell in line too, the movement starting at Carthage without even waiting for the authority of the proconsul Vipstanus Apronianus: Crescens, a freedman of Nero — for even men like this make themselves part of the state in bad times — had given the people a public feast to celebrate the new reign, and the crowd rushed to embrace it all without restraint. The rest of the African towns followed Carthage's lead.

79| With the armies and provinces thus split, Vitellius needed war to seize the fortune of the principate, while Otho carried out the duties of emperor as though at full peace — some of it done for the dignity of the state, but much of it, in his haste, done at the cost of decency for the sake of present advantage. He took the consulship himself with his brother Titianus for the term up to the Kalends of March; he assigned the following months to Verginius, as some consolation to the German army, and paired Pompeius Vopiscus with Verginius on the pretext of an old friendship — though most people read it as a favor to the people of Vienne. The remaining consulships stood as Nero or Galba had already arranged them: Caelius and Flavius Sabinus for the term into July, Arrius Antoninus and Marius Celsus for the term into September — offices that not even Vitellius, once victorious, took away. But Otho added priesthoods and augurships, crowning honors already given to old men who had earned them, or restored to young nobles just back from exile the ancestral priesthoods of their fathers and grandfathers, as some comfort for what they had suffered. He restored senatorial rank to Cadius Rufus, Pedius Blaesus, and [a name lost in the text], Saevinus — men who had fallen under Claudius and Nero on charges of extortion. It suited those forgiving them to relabel what had been greed as treason instead, a charge so hated at the time that even good laws were dying because of it.

80| With the same open-handedness he tried to win over the loyalty of towns and provinces as well: he granted new families of settlers to Hispalis and Emerita, full Roman citizenship to the whole people of the Lingones, and the towns of the Moors to the province of Baetica as a gift; he handed out new legal privileges to Cappadocia and to Africa — more for show than to last. Amid all this, though the pressing demands of the moment and urgent business might have excused it, he had not even then forgotten his old attachments: by decree of the Senate he restored the statues of Poppaea. He is also believed to have considered reviving the memory of Nero, hoping to win over the crowd by it. Indeed some people did put up images of Nero, and there were days when the people and soldiers hailed Otho as 'Nero Otho,' as if adding that name lent him distinction and glory. He himself left the matter hanging, afraid to forbid it and ashamed to accept it.

81| With everyone's attention turned to the civil war, foreign threats went unwatched. That made the Rhoxolani, a Sarmatian people, bolder: having cut down two cohorts the previous winter, they invaded Moesia in great hope, some nine thousand horsemen strong, driven more by confidence and the taste for plunder after their earlier success than by any wish to fight. So, catching them scattered and off guard, the Third Legion and its auxiliaries struck without warning. The Romans stood fully prepared for battle, while the Sarmatians were caught scattered, or slowed under the plunder they'd greedily piled onto their horses; their mounts, losing footing on the slick ground, lost speed too — and they went down as though bound hand and foot. It's remarkable to say, but all of a Sarmatian's fighting power lies, so to speak, outside himself: nothing is so useless as they are on foot, but when they charge in squadrons almost no line can stand against them. This time, though, on a wet day with the ice thawed, neither their lances nor their swords — which they wield two-handed, extremely long — were of any use, since their horses kept slipping and the weight of their armored coats dragged them down. That armor, worn by their chiefs and noblest men, is stitched together from iron plates or the hardest leather; it turns aside a blow perfectly well, but once its wearer is thrown down by the enemy's charge he cannot get back up, and men sank helplessly into the deep, soft snow besides. The Roman soldier, light in his breastplate, would close in with a javelin or lance as needed, then finish off the defenseless Sarmatian at close range with a light sword — for it is not their custom to carry a shield — until the few who survived the battle hid themselves away in the marshes, where the savagery of the winter, or their wounds, finished them off. When this news reached Rome, Marcus Aponius, governor of Moesia, was honored with a triumphal statue, and Fulvus Aurelius, Julianus Tettius, and Numisius Lupus, the legionary commanders, were awarded the ornaments of a consul — Otho delighted, and claiming the glory for himself, as though he too had brought the state good fortune in war through his own generals and his own armies.

82| Meanwhile a small incident, from a quarter where nobody expected trouble, nearly destroyed the city. Otho had ordered the Seventeenth Cohort brought up from the colony at Ostia; arming it was entrusted to Varius Crispinus, a tribune of the Praetorians. To get the job done while the camp was quiet, he had the cohort's wagons loaded at nightfall, with the armory left open. The hour bred suspicion, the errand bred accusation, and an attempt at quiet efficiency turned into a riot: the sight of weapons among drunken men stirred their appetite for weapons. The soldiers grumbled and accused the tribunes and centurions of treachery, claiming the arms were meant to equip senators' households for Otho's destruction. Some were simply ignorant and heavy with wine; the worst of them saw a chance for plunder; the rank and file, as always, were eager for any kind of upheaval, and night had stripped away the restraint that keeps better men in line. They cut down the tribune who tried to stop the riot, and the sternest of the centurions with him; they seized weapons, bared their swords, mounted up, and rode for the city and the Palace.

83| Otho was hosting a large dinner party, full of the city's leading men and women, when the news came. They panicked, unsure whether this was a random soldiers' frenzy or a plot by the emperor, unsure whether it was more dangerous to stay and be caught or to flee and be scattered. One moment they feigned composure, the next their fear showed through, and all the while they watched Otho's face. As happens when minds are already tipped toward suspicion, Otho was feared because he was afraid. But he was as alarmed for the senate's danger as for his own: he sent the Praetorian prefects at once to calm the soldiers' anger, and ordered everyone to leave the banquet quickly. Then indeed the magistrates scattered in every direction, throwing off the badges of office, avoiding the crowds of attendants and slaves; old men and women crept through back streets in the dark, few reaching their own homes, most seeking the houses of friends, or, according to how humble a client each man had, some uncertain hiding place.

84| The soldiers' rush was not even stopped at the doors of the Palace; they burst into the banquet, demanding to be shown Otho, and wounded the tribune Julius Martialis and Vitellius Saturninus, commander of a legion, as the two tried to block their way. Weapons and threats were everywhere, aimed now at centurions and tribunes, now at the whole senate, minds crazed with blind panic; and because they could fix on no single target for their rage, they demanded license against everyone, until Otho, standing on his couch against all imperial dignity, barely held them back with pleading and tears. They went back to camp unwilling, and no less guilty than before. The next day the city lay shut up as if captured: streets nearly empty, the common people gloomy, the soldiers' faces cast down, showing more sullenness than repentance. The prefects Licinius Proculus and Plotius Firmus addressed them company by company, each in his own manner, one gentler, one harsher. The upshot was a payment of five thousand sesterces to every soldier; only then did Otho dare enter the camp. There the tribunes and centurions crowded around him, throwing down their badges of rank, begging for peace and safety. The men sensed the resentment this stirred and, falling back into obedience, themselves demanded the ringleaders of the mutiny be put to death.

85| Otho faced a turbulent situation and a divided army: the best of the soldiers wanted the present license curbed, but the mass of them, the majority, took pleasure in riot and in an emperor who courted their favor, and could easily be pushed toward civil war through disorder and plunder. He also reasoned that power won by crime could not be held by sudden restraint and old-fashioned severity. Torn by anxiety over the city's danger and the senate's peril, he finally spoke to them: 'It is not to kindle your affection for me, fellow soldiers, nor to spur your courage — both are already superb — that I have come, but to ask you to temper your own boldness and set some limit to your devotion to me. The recent uproar began not from greed or hatred, the usual causes that drive armies into disorder, nor from cowardice or fear of danger: your excessive loyalty stirred you up more fiercely than wisely. Honorable motives, if judgment is not applied, often lead to disastrous outcomes. We are marching to war. Does the situation, does the speed events demand, allow every report to be heard openly, every plan discussed with everyone present? Soldiers sometimes need not to know certain things as much as to know others. That is how a commander's authority works, how strict discipline works: much must simply be ordered, even to centurions and tribunes, without their being told why. If every man is free to ask why he is ordered, obedience dies, and with it, command itself. Or will weapons be seized again in the dead of night? Will one or two ruined, drunken men — for I cannot believe more than that went mad in the recent panic — stain their hands with a centurion's or a tribune's blood, and burst into their own emperor's tent?'

86| 'You did that, in your minds, for my sake. But amid confusion, darkness, and general chaos, an opportunity can open up against me as well. If Vitellius and his followers were given the choice of what state of mind, what disposition to wish on us, what would they pray for but mutiny and discord — that soldier not obey centurion, centurion not obey tribune, so that infantry and cavalry, thrown into confusion, rush together to destruction? Obedience, fellow soldiers, not interrogation of your commanders' orders, is what holds military affairs together, and the bravest army in the actual crisis is the one that was quietest before the crisis. Keep your weapons and your courage; leave judgment and the direction of your valor to me. The fault was a few men's; the punishment will fall on two. The rest of you, wipe out the memory of that shameful night. Let no army anywhere ever hear such words raised against the senate. The head of the empire, the glory of every province — by Hercules, not even the Germans whom Vitellius is now stirring up against us would dare call it to account. Would any true sons of Italy, any genuine Roman youth, demand blood and slaughter against the order whose splendor and glory outshine the squalor and obscurity of the Vitellian faction? Vitellius has seized a few tribes and holds something like an army; the senate is with us. So it stands: on this side the republic, on that the republic's enemies. And do you think this beautiful city stands on houses and roofs and piles of stone? Those mute, lifeless things can perish and be rebuilt easily enough; but the permanence of our affairs, the peace of the nations, my safety and yours, are secured by the senate's survival. This order, founded under good omens by the father and founder of our city, and continued unbroken from the kings down to the emperors, as we received it from our ancestors, let us hand on to those who come after us. For as senators are born from you, so emperors are born from senators.'

87| The speech, aimed at calming and softening the soldiers' feelings, along with the measured severity of the punishment — he had ordered execution of no more than two men — was received with gratitude, and for the moment those who could not be restrained were pacified. Still, quiet did not return to the city: the clatter of weapons and the look of war remained. Though the soldiers caused no general disturbance, they were scattered through private houses in plain clothes, and there was a spiteful watchfulness turned on anyone whom rank, wealth, or some conspicuous distinction had exposed to rumor. Many even believed that Vitellian soldiers had come into the city to sound out party sympathies. So everything was full of suspicion, and hardly any household felt safe even behind closed doors. But the greatest anxiety was in public, where people's expressions and moods shifted with whatever rumor reached them, for fear of seeming to doubt in uncertain times or to show too little joy at good news. When the senate was finally forced to convene, striking the right note on everything was a delicate business: too stubborn a silence looked suspicious, too much freedom of speech looked suspect, and for a man so recently a private citizen saying the same things, flattery was easily recognized. So they turned their statements this way and that, calling Vitellius an enemy and a parricide; the most cautious among them used only conventional insults, while a few hurled genuine accusations, but always amid noise, where many voices spoke at once, drowning each other out in a confusion of words.

88| Prodigies too added to the terror, reported from various sources: in the forecourt of the Capitol, the reins of the chariot on which the statue of Victory stood had slipped from her hands; a figure larger than human had burst from the shrine of Juno; on the island in the Tiber, the statue of the deified Julius swung round on its own — no wind stirring, the day dead calm — and ended up facing east instead of west; an ox had spoken in Etruria; there were unusual births among animals, and many other things that in earlier, cruder ages were noted even in peacetime but now are reported only in times of fear. But the chief terror, one that threatened destruction both present and future, was a sudden flood of the Tiber: swollen immensely, it tore down the wooden bridge, and, thrown back by the wreckage blocking its way, poured out not only over the low, flat parts of the city but even over places normally thought safe from such disasters. Many were swept away in the open streets, more caught in shops and in their beds. Famine struck the common people through loss of work and shortage of food. The foundations of the tenement blocks were undermined by the standing water, then collapsed as the river receded. And as soon as minds were free from immediate danger, the very fact that the flood had blocked the Campus Martius and the Flaminian Way — Otho's route as he prepared his campaign — was twisted from chance or natural cause into a prodigy and omen of disasters to come.

89| Otho purified the city and weighed his war plans. Since the Pennine and Cottian Alps and the other approaches to Gaul were blocked by Vitellius's forces, he decided to attack Narbonese Gaul with a strong fleet loyal to his cause. He had enrolled the survivors of the massacre at the Milvian Bridge, along with those Galba had cruelly kept under guard, into a legion, giving everyone else hope of honored service later on. He added to the fleet the urban cohorts and most of the praetorians - men who were the strength and sinew of the army, and who served the commanders themselves as advisers and as watchmen. Overall command of the expedition went to the senior centurions Antonius Novellus and Suedius Clemens, and to Aemilius Pacensis, whose tribunate Galba had stripped and Otho had restored. Charge of the ships stayed with the freedman Moschus, kept on to keep an eye on the loyalty of his social betters. Suetonius Paulinus, Marius Celsus, and Annius Gallus were named commanders of the infantry and cavalry, but the greatest trust fell on Licinius Proculus, prefect of the Praetorian Guard. Tireless in city soldiering but green in real war, he undercut Paulinus's authority, Celsus's energy, and Gallus's steadiness by slandering each in turn - the easiest thing in the world to do - and so this crooked, clever man got ahead of better, more modest ones.

90| Around this time Cornelius Dolabella was removed to the colony at Aquinum - not held under close or secret guard, and charged with no crime, but marked out simply because of his old name and his kinship with Galba. Otho ordered many magistrates and a large share of the ex-consuls to accompany him on campaign, not as partners or aides in the war but dressed up as his entourage - among them Lucius Vitellius, treated exactly like the rest, neither as an emperor's brother nor as an enemy. So anxiety stirred through the city; no rank was free of fear or danger. The Senate's foremost men, weakened by age and dulled by long peace; the nobility, sluggish and having forgotten war; knights ignorant of soldiering - the harder all of them tried to hide and bury their fear, the more plainly it showed. On the other hand there was no shortage of men whose foolish vanity made them buy conspicuous weapons and showy horses, and some who bought lavish banquets and instruments of pleasure as if these were the equipment of war. Sensible men worried about peace and the state; the shallowest, blind to what was coming, swelled with empty hope; many, their credit already wrecked, had been anxious in peacetime and now, with everything in turmoil, felt eager - safest, in fact, amid the uncertainty.

91| But the common people, and the populace, whose very numbers left it with no share in the common concerns, began little by little to feel the war's damage, as all the money got diverted to the soldiers' use and food prices tightened - hardships that Vindex's uprising, with the city then untouched and the war a provincial affair, had not inflicted on ordinary people in the same way, since that had seemed almost a foreign war fought between the legions and the Gauls. For from the time the deified Augustus settled the state of the Caesars, the Roman people had fought its wars far off, for one man's worry or glory alone. Under Tiberius and Gaius only setbacks in peace touched the republic. Scribonianus's attempt against Claudius was crushed the moment word of it broke. Nero was toppled more by messages and rumors than by arms. But now legions and fleets, and - rare in other times - the praetorian and urban soldiers too, were being marched into battle, with the East and the West and every force on both sides left behind them: had other commanders been fighting, there was material here for a long war. Some tried to delay Otho's departure, citing the religious scruple that the sacred shields had not yet been put away; he brushed aside all delay, as he said it had also destroyed Nero. And Caecina had already crossed the Alps and was pressing him on.

92| On the day before the Ides of March, having commended the state to the senators, Otho granted to recalled exiles what remained of Nero's confiscated property not yet paid into the treasury - a most just gift, and impressive to look at, but by then, after the long-ago rush to collect it, of little practical value. Then, calling an assembly, he praised the majesty of the city and the united will of people and Senate on his behalf, and spoke moderately against the Vitellian side, blaming the legions' folly rather than any daring on their part, and making no mention of Vitellius at all - whether from restraint on Otho's own part, or because the speechwriter, fearing for himself, held back from insulting Vitellius, since it was believed that just as Suetonius Paulinus and Marius Celsus guided Otho's war councils, so Galerius Trachalus's talent shaped his public business. Some in fact recognized the very style of the speech, familiar from frequent use in the forum, broad and resonant, well suited to filling the crowd's ears. The shouts and cries of the mob followed the usual pattern of excessive, false flattery: they competed in enthusiasm and prayers as if escorting the dictator Caesar or the emperor Augustus, not out of fear or love but from sheer appetite for servility - as happens in households, each man driven by his own private motive, with the public honor already grown cheap. Otho then set out, leaving the city's peace and the cares of government to his brother Salvius Titianus.

← All of Tacitus: The Complete Works of Tacitus