Histories — Book 2

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

1| Now fortune, in another part of the world, was laying the groundwork and causes of a new imperial power—one that mixed fortune would make now a blessing, now a horror for the state, and for the emperors themselves either triumph or ruin. Titus Vespasian had been sent by his father from Judaea, while Galba still lived, and gave as his reason for the journey his duty to the emperor and his own ripening age for seeking office. But the crowd, always eager to invent, had spread the story that he'd been summoned for adoption. The gossip fed on the emperor's age and childlessness and on the state's habit of restlessness until one man is chosen—too many candidates in play. Titus's own reputation added fuel: a character equal to any fortune, a handsome face carrying a certain majesty, his father's run of success, prophetic omens, and—since minds inclined to believe turn even accidents into signs—chance events read as portents. When at Corinth, a city of Achaia, he received sure news of Galba's death, and there were those on hand insisting that Vitellius had taken up arms and war was underway, he grew anxious and, calling in a few friends, weighed every angle. If he pressed on to Rome, he'd win no credit for the courtesy, since it would be paid to someone else's honor, and he'd become a hostage to either Vitellius or Otho. If he turned back, the victor's resentment was certain—but the victory itself was still uncertain, and if his father joined the winning side, the son would be excused. But if Vespasian himself seized power, then in the business of war, old grievances would have to be forgotten.

2| Tossed between hope and fear by these and similar thoughts, hope won out. Some believed that longing for Queen Berenice turned him back; his youthful heart was not indifferent to Berenice, but that never got in the way of business—he'd spent his youth enjoying its pleasures, more restrained under his own command than his father's. So he sailed along the coast of Achaia and Asia, keeping the left shore of the sea, and made for the islands of Rhodes and Cyprus, then pushed on toward Syria in bolder stretches. There the urge struck him to visit the temple of Paphian Venus, famous among natives and foreigners alike. It won't take long to lay out, briefly, the origins of the cult, the temple's rites, and the goddess's form—for nowhere else is she worshipped quite this way.

3| Old tradition says the temple's founder was King Aerias; some claim that name belongs to the goddess herself. A more recent story holds that Cinyras consecrated the temple, and that the goddess was conceived from the sea and washed ashore here; but that the skill and lore of the haruspices were imported, brought by Tamiras the Cilician, under an agreement that the descendants of both families would preside over the rites. Later, so the royal line wouldn't be outranked in honor by a foreign stock, the guest family gave up the very knowledge they had brought: only a priest of the line of Cinyras is now consulted. Victims are chosen as each worshipper vows, but males only; the surest guidance comes from the entrails of kid goats. Pouring blood on the altar is forbidden—offerings are burned with prayers and pure fire, and though the altar stands in the open, it's never wet by rain. The goddess's image bears no human shape: it's an unbroken circle, wide at the base and narrowing upward like a cone, but the reason for this is unclear.

4| Titus, having inspected the temple's wealth and the gifts of kings and all the other things a Greek people, delighted in antiquities, attaches to uncertain origins, first asked about his voyage. Once told the way was open and the sea favorable, he asked, in veiled terms, about himself, after many victims had been slaughtered. Sostratus—that was the priest's name—seeing the entrails favorable and matching the grand questions, that the goddess was giving her assent, gave a brief, conventional answer for the moment, then, asking for a private audience, revealed the future. Titus, his spirits lifted, sailed on to his father, bringing to the anxious minds of the provinces and armies an immense new confidence.

5| By this point Vespasian had crushed the main strength of the Jewish revolt; nothing remained but to take Jerusalem itself—a grim, uphill task that owed less to any fight still left in the besieged than to the ruggedness of their mountain stronghold and their stubborn, superstitious refusal to yield. Vespasian himself, as noted earlier, had three legions, battle-tested; Mucianus held four in Syria, at peace—but rivalry, and envy of the glory won by the nearby army, had shaken off any sluggishness; and just as danger and hardship had built strength in the one, …untroubled rest and inexperience of war had added keenness to the other […text corrupt…]. Both had auxiliary cohorts and cavalry wings and fleets, and kings, and a name renowned though in different ways.

6| Vespasian was a keen soldier: he marched at the head of the column, chose the ground for camp, wrestled with the enemy night and day by strategy and, when needed, by force, ate whatever food came to hand, and in dress and bearing was barely distinguishable from a common soldier—in short, but for his greed, he matched the generals of old. Mucianus, by contrast, was set apart by splendor, wealth, and a scale to everything that went beyond what a private citizen should have; he was the better speaker, skilled in organizing and planning civil affairs. Together they'd have made an ideal ruler, if you could strip the flaws from each and blend only their virtues. As it was, one commanded Syria, the other Judaea, and as neighboring governors they'd clashed in jealousy—until, at last, with Nero's death, they set their grudges aside and worked together, first through friends, then—and this did more than anything to seal their harmony—through Titus, who dissolved their petty rivalry for the common good, being by nature and by cultivation suited even to winning over a man like Mucianus's temperament. Tribunes, centurions, and the ranks of common soldiers were won over by hard work, by license, by virtues, by pleasures—whatever suited each man's character.

7| Before Titus arrived, both armies had already sworn allegiance to Otho, given how fast such news travels, however slow the machinery of civil war—and the East, quiet through long peace, was for the first time gearing up for it. In the past, the fiercest wars among citizens had started in Italy or Gaul, driven by the strength of the West; and for Pompey, Cassius, Brutus, Antony—all of whom civil war followed across the sea—the outcomes had not been kind. In Syria and Judaea, emperors had more often been heard of than seen. No legion had mutinied there—only threats against the Parthians, with mixed results; and in the most recent civil war, while everything else was in turmoil, peace there had held unshaken, then loyalty to Galba. But once word spread that Otho and Vitellius were dragging Roman power into their criminal war, and that the rewards of empire would go to others while they themselves were left with nothing but the burden of obedience, the soldiers began to grumble and take stock of their own strength. There were seven legions at once, with enormous auxiliary forces, in Syria and Judaea; next door, Egypt with two legions; on the other side, Cappadocia and Pontus and whatever garrisons faced the Armenians. Asia and the other provinces were neither short of men nor poor in money. And all the islands ringed by that sea, and the sea itself, meanwhile, made preparing for war both easy and safe.

8| Their commanders read the men's eagerness plainly enough, yet chose to hold back and let the rest fight it out first. In civil war, they reasoned, victors and vanquished never truly come together in good faith, and it made little difference whether fortune left Vitellius or Otho standing. Success turns even outstanding commanders arrogant; discord, laziness, excess, and their own vices would doom one of the two—war for one, victory itself for the other. So they put off taking up arms until the moment was right—Vespasian and Mucianus only recently, the rest much earlier, their plans already intertwined. The best men were driven by love of the republic; many were spurred by the sweetness of plunder; others by shaky finances at home. So good men and bad, for entirely different reasons but with equal zeal, all wanted the war.

9| Around the same time, Achaia and Asia were thrown into a false panic, as though Nero were on his way—rumors about his death varied so much that plenty of people were inventing and believing that he was still alive. We'll tell the fates and attempts of the others as the story unfolds; for now: a slave from Pontus, or, as others report, a freedman from Italy, skilled with the lyre and in singing—which, along with a facial resemblance, made the imposture more convincing—took to the sea, joined by deserters whom poverty had left drifting and whom huge promises had corrupted. Driven by storms onto the island of Cythnus, he recruited some soldiers passing through from the East, or had those who refused killed, and after robbing merchants he armed the strongest of their slaves. He worked on a centurion named Sisenna, who was carrying clasped right hands—tokens of friendship—from the Syrian army to the praetorians, trying every trick, until Sisenna slipped off the island in secret, fearful and dreading violence. From there terror spread far and wide: many, drawn by the fame of the name, were stirred by a longing for upheaval and hatred of the present order. But the story, swelling day by day, was scattered by chance.

10| Galba had entrusted the provinces of Galatia and Pamphylia to Calpurnius Asprenas to govern. Two triremes from the fleet at Misenum had been assigned to escort him, and with these he put in at the island of Cythnus—and there was no shortage of men urging the ship-captains, in Nero's name, to come to him. He, composing his face into sorrow and invoking the loyalty of his former soldiers, begged them to set him down in Syria or Egypt. The captains, wavering—whether from doubt or from cunning—assured him they would speak to their men and return once everyone was ready. But everything was faithfully reported to Asprenas, and on his orders the ship was stormed and whoever the man really was, he was killed. His body—striking for its eyes, its hair, its grim expression—was carried to Asia and from there to Rome.

11| In a state torn by discord, where the rapid turnover of emperors left the line between liberty and license unclear, even small matters stirred great commotion. Vibius Crispus—famous for his money, his power, and his talent, though not for his character—hauled Annius Faustus, a Roman knight who had made a career of informing under Nero, before the senate for judgment. The senate had recently decreed, in the early days of Galba's reign, that the cases of informers should be examined. That decree had been applied unevenly, strong or weak depending on whether the accused was powerful or poor, but it still carried some terror. Crispus threw his personal weight behind destroying the man who had informed against his own brother, and he swayed a large part of the senate to demand that Faustus be condemned undefended and unheard. Others, though, argued that nothing helped a defendant more than an accuser with too much power: they said he should be given time, the charges should be published, and even a man both hated and guilty deserved a hearing by custom. This view prevailed at first, and the trial was put off for a few days. Faustus was soon condemned, but not with anything like the public approval his depraved conduct had earned him—people remembered that Crispus himself had run the very same rackets, for the very same profit. What displeased them was not the punishment of the crime, but the man punishing it.

12| Meanwhile Otho's prospects for war looked bright, as the armies of Dalmatia and Pannonia moved to back his rule. There were four legions; two thousand men from each went ahead, while the main bodies followed at a measured pace—the Seventh, raised by Galba; the veteran Eleventh and Thirteenth; and above all the famous Fourteenth, which had crushed the British rebellion. Nero had added to their glory by handpicking them as his best troops, which left them long loyal to Nero and now eager for Otho. But the very confidence that gave them strength also made them slow. Ahead of the legions marched the cavalry wings and auxiliary cohorts. From Rome itself came no small force: five praetorian cohorts, cavalry squadrons, the First Legion, and—an uglier addition—two thousand gladiators, a disgraceful kind of help, but one even strict commanders had used in civil wars. Annius Gallus was put in command of these forces and sent ahead with Vestricius Spurinna to seize the banks of the Po, since the first plan—to stop Caecina inside Gaul—had already failed, Caecina having crossed the Alps. Otho himself was accompanied by a handpicked corps of scouts, the rest of the praetorian cohorts, veterans of the guard, and a huge number of marines. His own march was neither lazy nor soft with luxury: he wore an iron breastplate and walked on foot ahead of the standards, rough, unkempt, nothing like his reputation.

13| Fortune smiled on the venture at first. Otho's forces held the sea and the fleet, and most of Italy as far as the start of the Maritime Alps, which Suedius Clemens, Antonius Novellus, and Aemilius Pacensis had been sent to probe, along with the province of Narbonese Gaul. But Pacensis was put in chains by mutinous troops, Antonius Novellus carried no authority, and Suedius Clemens ruled by courting the soldiers' favor—as corrupt against discipline as he was eager for a fight. It was as if they weren't marching through Italy, through their own homeland, but foreign shores and enemy cities—they burned, plundered, and ravaged, and all the more savagely because nothing had been arranged anywhere to check the terror. Fields lay full, houses stood open; and when owners came out to meet the soldiers, wives and children in tow, they found themselves trapped—caught between peace's false security and war's real evil. At that time the Maritime Alps were held by the procurator Marius Maturus. He raised the local tribes—there was no shortage of young men—and tried to keep Otho's forces out of the province. But at the first clash the hill people were cut down and scattered, since they had been gathered in haste, knew neither camp discipline nor commander, and found neither honor in winning nor shame in fleeing.

14| Angered by that fight, Otho's soldiers turned their fury on the town of Albintimilium. There was no plunder to be had from the battle itself—the country folk were poor and their weapons worthless, and being swift and knowing the ground, they couldn't be caught. So the soldiers' greed fed instead on the miseries of the innocent. What made this worse was one striking example: a Ligurian woman had hidden her son, and when the soldiers, assuming she was hiding money as well, tortured her to learn where the boy was, she pointed to her womb and said that was where he was hidden. No threat, not even death, ever shook the courage of that remarkable answer.

15| Terrified messengers reached Fabius Valens with word that Otho's fleet was threatening Narbonese Gaul—a province sworn to Vitellius—while the colonies sent their own envoys, begging for help. Valens sent two Tungrian cohorts, four cavalry squadrons, and the entire Treviran cavalry wing under the prefect Julius Classicus. Part of this force was kept back at the colony of Forum Julii, so that the fleet would not race ahead across an undefended sea while all his troops marched overland. Twelve cavalry squadrons and picked men from the cohorts went out against the enemy, joined by a Ligurian cohort—long the local defense force—and five hundred Pannonians not yet formally enrolled. Battle came without delay. The line was drawn up so that some of the marines, mixed with local civilians, held the hills near the sea; the praetorian troops filled the flat ground between hills and shore; and out at sea itself the fleet lay ready for battle, drawn up and facing menacingly toward the shore. The Vitellians, weaker in infantry but strong in cavalry, placed their Alpine troops on the nearest ridges and packed their cohorts in dense ranks behind the horsemen. The Treviran squadrons charged the enemy carelessly, only to be met head-on by the veteran troops, while from the flank they were pelted with stones—even the local civilians proved handy at throwing them, brave and cowardly alike daring the same when victory seemed near. Terror struck the shaken Vitellians when the fleet sailed in behind their fighting line; hemmed in on every side, their whole force would have been wiped out had the darkness of night not held back the victorious army and screened the fugitives.

16| Beaten as they were, the Vitellians did not stay quiet. They called up reinforcements and struck at an enemy grown careless and overconfident from success. They cut down the sentries, broke into the camp, and threw the ships' crews into panic, until fear gradually settled and the Othonians, holding a nearby hill, defended themselves and then broke out in turn. Brutal slaughter followed; the prefects of the Tungrian cohorts, after holding their line a long time under fire, were finally overwhelmed. The Othonians' victory was not bloodless either—their cavalry, wheeling about, surrounded the men who had pursued too recklessly. Then, as if by some unspoken truce, so that neither the fleet on one side nor the cavalry on the other could spring sudden terror on the other, the Vitellians withdrew to Antipolis, a town of Narbonese Gaul, and the Othonians to Albingaunum in inner Liguria.

17| Corsica, Sardinia, and the other islands of that sea stayed loyal to Otho's side simply on the strength of his fleet's reputation. But Corsica nearly came to ruin through the recklessness of the procurator Decumus Pacarius—an act that, however great the war as a whole, could never have helped the cause, and only destroyed himself. Out of hatred for Otho, he decided to use Corsican manpower to aid Vitellius, though the help would have been useless even if it had come off. He called together the island's leading men and laid out his plan; those who dared object—Claudius Pyrrichus, captain of the Liburnian warships stationed there, and Quintius Certus, a Roman knight—he had put to death. Their deaths terrified the rest, and the crowd present, ignorant of the facts and sharing the fear of men who knew no better, swore allegiance to Vitellius. But once Pacarius began holding a levy and wearing out these untrained men with the burdens of military duty, they came to hate this unfamiliar labor and think hard about their own weakness: they lived on an island, they said, while Germany and the strength of the legions lay far away; even places protected by cohorts and cavalry wings had been plundered and ravaged by a fleet. Their feelings turned suddenly, though not into open revolt—they chose instead the right moment for treachery. Once Pacarius's usual attendants had left him, he was murdered, naked and defenseless, in the baths; his companions were slaughtered too. The killers carried the heads to Otho as if they were enemies'. But Otho neither rewarded them nor did Vitellius punish them, lost as they were in the general filth of the times amid far greater crimes.

18| Italy had already been thrown open and the war carried across it, as noted earlier, by the Silian cavalry wing—not out of any love for Otho among the men, nor because they preferred Vitellius, but because long peace had worn them down into readiness for any master, easy prey for whoever seized the moment and indifferent to who was better. The richest strip of Italy, all the plains and cities between the Po and the Alps, was now held by Vitellius's forces, since the cohorts Caecina had sent ahead had also arrived. Near Cremona a Pannonian cohort was taken prisoner; between Placentia and Ticinum, a thousand marines together with a hundred horsemen were cut off and lost. Buoyed by this success, the Vitellian troops were no longer held back by river or riverbank—indeed, the Po itself provoked the Batavians and the men from beyond the Rhine, who suddenly crossed it opposite Placentia, snatched a few scouts, and so frightened the rest that they ran off in a panic, falsely reporting that Caecina's whole army was at hand.

19| Spurinna, who held Placentia, was certain Caecina had not yet arrived, and resolved that if he drew near, he would keep his troops inside the fortifications rather than throw three praetorian cohorts, a thousand auxiliaries, and a handful of cavalry against a veteran army. But his soldiers, unruly and ignorant of war, seized the standards and colors and rushed out, brandishing their weapons at the commander who tried to hold them back, ignoring their centurions and tribunes—shouting that Otho was being betrayed and that Caecina had been called in. Spurinna, swept along by a recklessness not his own, went with them—forced at first, then pretending he wanted it, so that his advice would carry more weight once the mutiny began to cool.

20| Once the Po came into view and night was closing in, they decided to fortify the camp. This labor was unfamiliar to soldiers used to city life, and it crushed their spirits. The oldest hands began scolding their own credulity, pointing out how frightening and dangerous it would be if Caecina, with his whole army, surrounded so few cohorts in open country. Soon the whole camp was full of subdued talk, and the centurions and tribunes, joining in, praised their commander's foresight in choosing a colony strong in men and resources as their base for the war. Spurinna himself, in the end, blamed less than he explained, and leaving scouts behind, led the rest back to Placentia, now calmer and more willing to obey orders. The walls were reinforced, ramparts added, towers raised higher; they saw to it that they had not just weapons but discipline and a readiness to obey — the one thing that side had lacked, since courage was never in short supply.

21| Caecina, meanwhile, as if he'd left his savagery and license behind in the Alps, marched through Italy in good order. Yet the towns and colonies took offense at his own appearance, since he addressed men in togas while wearing a cloak of many colors and trousers, the barbarian's covering. They also resented his wife Salonina, though she rode along causing no one any harm, simply because she was conspicuous on her horse in purple — it's human nature to eye other people's good fortune with sharp resentment and to demand moderation most strictly from those we've seen as our equals. Caecina crossed the Po, tested the loyalty of Otho's men through talks and promises, and was tested in turn by them; but once peace and harmony had been bandied about as fine-sounding, empty words, he turned his plans and energies toward assaulting Placentia, to great terror — knowing that however a war began, that reputation would color everything after.

22| The first day went more on the strength of the assault than the skill of a veteran army: the attackers approached the walls exposed and careless, heavy with food and wine. In that fighting the amphitheater, a magnificent structure standing outside the walls, burned down — whether set alight by the attackers hurling torches, firebrands, and incendiary missiles at the defenders, or by the defenders throwing them back. The townspeople, prone to suspicion, believed the fire had been deliberately started by people from neighboring colonies out of envy and rivalry, since no other building in Italy was so vast. Whatever the actual cause, while they feared worse things it seemed a small matter, but once safety was restored they grieved over it as though it were the worst thing that could have happened to them. In any case Caecina was driven back with heavy losses among his own men, and the night was spent preparing siege works. The Vitellians got mantlets, wicker screens, and sheds ready for undermining the walls and shielding the attackers; Otho's men prepared stakes and huge masses of stone, lead, and bronze to crush and bury the enemy. Both sides burned with pride and craved glory, and each had its own battle-cry to rally behind — one side boasting the might of its legions and of Germany's army, the other the city's pride troops and the Praetorian cohorts. The one side mocked the other as soldiers gone soft and lazy, corrupted by the circus and theater; the other mocked them as foreign outsiders. At the same time, cheering for Otho or Vitellius, or damning them, they goaded each other with insults more than praise.

23| Day had barely broken when the walls were crowded with defenders, and the fields blazed with weapons and men: the dense column of the legions, the scattered bands of auxiliaries, attacked the higher parts of the walls with arrows and stones, and closed in hand-to-hand where the defenses were weak or crumbling with age. From above, Otho's men rained javelins down with a more deliberate, steady aim on the German cohorts as they rushed in recklessly, chanting their fierce war-cry, in the custom of their people, bare-chested, beating their shields against their shoulders. The legionaries, protected by mantlets and wicker screens, undermined the walls, built ramps, and worked at the gates; the Praetorians, in response, sent millstones — kept ready for exactly this purpose — crashing down with tremendous weight and noise. Some of the attackers were crushed, others pierced through and bled white or torn apart; as panic increased the carnage, and they were wounded all the more savagely from the walls because of it, they fell back, their reputation damaged. Caecina, ashamed of having launched the attack so rashly, and unwilling to sit mocked and beaten before the same camp, crossed the Po again and made for Cremona. As he withdrew, Turullius Cerialis surrendered to him along with a good number of marines, and Julius Briganticus with a few cavalrymen — the latter a prefect of a cavalry wing, born among the Batavians, the former a former chief centurion not unfriendly to Caecina, since he'd served under him in the ranks in Germany.

24| When Spurinna learned of the enemy's movements, he wrote to Annius Gallus, informing him that Placentia had been defended and reporting what had happened and what Caecina was planning next. Gallus was bringing the First Legion to help defend Placentia, distrusting the small number of the cohorts already there, worried they couldn't hold out against a long siege and the force of the German army. But when he learned Caecina had been repulsed and was heading for Cremona, he halted the legion at Bedriacum — with difficulty, since it had grown so eager for battle it nearly mutinied. Bedriacum is a village between Verona and Cremona, already made notorious by two Roman disasters.

25| In those same days, Martius Macro fought successfully not far from Cremona. Bold by nature, Martius ferried gladiators across by boat and suddenly unleashed them on the far bank of the Po. The Vitellian auxiliaries there were thrown into confusion, and while the rest fled toward Cremona, those who stood their ground were cut down. But he held back his men's momentum in victory, so the enemy couldn't be reinforced with fresh troops and turn the battle around. Otho's men grew suspicious of this restraint, since they judged every move their commanders made in the worst light. Whoever was most cowardly in spirit was most reckless in speech, and they vied with each other flinging every accusation they could think of against Annius Gallus and Suetonius Paulinus and Marius Celsus, for Otho had given these men command as well. The fiercest instigators of this mutinous discord were the killers of Galba, driven half-mad by guilt and fear, stirring everything into chaos, sometimes with open, inflammatory speeches, sometimes with secret letters to Otho. And Otho, always ready to believe the lowliest men and fearful of the honorable ones, wavered anxiously — uncertain in success, but stronger amid adversity. So he sent for his brother Titianus and put him in charge of the war.

26| Meanwhile, under the leadership of Paulinus and Celsus, things went remarkably well. Caecina was troubled that all his efforts had come to nothing and that his army's reputation was fading. Driven back from Placentia, his auxiliaries recently cut down, worn down even in the frequent but not particularly noteworthy skirmishes between scouting parties, and outmatched — with Fabius Valens drawing near, he hurried to recover his glory, more eager than wise, so that all the war's honor wouldn't fall to Valens instead. About twelve miles from Cremona, at a place called Castores, he hid his fiercest auxiliary troops in the woods overhanging the road: the cavalry were ordered to advance further out, provoke a fight, then feign a retreat, drawing on the pursuit until it rushed headlong into the trap. Word of the scheme reached Otho's commanders beforehand, and command was split: Paulinus over the infantry, Celsus over the cavalry. The standard of the Thirteenth Legion, four auxiliary cohorts, and five hundred cavalry were positioned on the left; three Praetorian cohorts, drawn up in deep ranks, held the raised road; on the right flank the First Legion advanced with two auxiliary cohorts and five hundred cavalry. Above these, a thousand cavalry from the Praetorian Guard and the auxiliaries were held in reserve, to exploit success or reinforce the struggling.

27| Before the battle lines clashed, the Vitellians turned to flee, but Celsus, seeing through the trick, held his men back. The Vitellians, rashly growing bold, pursued Celsus as he slowly gave ground, and pursued too far and of their own accord plunged into an ambush: cohorts closed in from the flanks, the legions faced them head-on, and cavalry suddenly swept around behind and encircled them. Suetonius Paulinus did not immediately give the infantry the signal to attack: cautious by nature, and preferring careful plans grounded in reason over gambles on luck, he ordered the ditches filled in, the field opened up, and the line spread out, reckoning that victory begun late enough was won soon enough, so long as care had been taken not to lose. This delay gave the Vitellians time to flee into vineyards tangled with vine-trellises, and a small patch of woods lay nearby, from which they dared to rally and killed some of the boldest of the Praetorian cavalry. King Epiphanes was wounded there, fighting energetically for Otho's cause.

28| Then Otho's infantry burst forward; the enemy's line was crushed and put to flight, and even the reinforcements coming up turned and ran with them. For Caecina had not brought up his cohorts together but one at a time, which only increased the panic in the fighting, as terror swept away troops scattered thin and nowhere strong enough. A mutiny broke out even in the camp because not everyone had been led out to fight: the camp prefect Julius Gratus was put in chains, accused of betraying his own side to his brother, who was serving under Otho — while Otho's men, on the same charge, had chained that brother, the tribune Julius Fronto. In any case, there was such widespread panic everywhere among the fleeing and those rushing to meet them, in the battle line and before the rampart, that it was widely said on both sides afterward that Caecina and his entire army could have been wiped out, had Suetonius Paulinus not sounded the retreat. Paulinus himself claimed he had feared the extra strain of marching and fighting on top of all that, in case fresh Vitellian troops, just out of camp, fell on his exhausted men with no reserves behind them if they broke. Few approved of his reasoning; among the common soldiers, the rumor turned against him.

29| This setback didn't so much frighten the Vitellians as sober them up. It wasn't just among Caecina's men, where he'd blamed the trouble on soldiers more ready for mutiny than battle — Fabius Valens's forces too (he had by now reached Ticinum) dropped their contempt for the enemy, and eager to redeem their reputation, obeyed their commander with more respect and discipline. A serious mutiny had in fact broken out among them, and I need to go back further to explain it properly — I couldn't interrupt the account of Caecina's campaign to do so. The Batavian cohorts, which as I've mentioned had split from the Fourteenth Legion during Nero's war, and on their way to Britain heard of Vitellius's uprising and joined Fabius Valens among the Lingones, had been swaggering — boasting to every legion's tents they visited that they'd humbled the men of the Fourteenth, stripped Italy from Nero, and now held the whole fortune of the war in their own hands. The soldiers found this insulting, the commander found it galling; discipline broke down in quarrels and brawls; and eventually Valens's suspicion of their insolence hardened into suspicion of outright treachery.

30| Then word arrived that Otho's fleet had routed the Treviran and Tungrian cavalry and was raiding around Narbonese Gaul. Anxious both to protect the allies and — with soldierly cunning — to break up the turbulent cohorts, which united would be too dangerous, Valens ordered part of the Batavians to go as reinforcements. When this got out, the allies grieved and the legions roared with anger. They were being robbed, they said, of their bravest men's help — veterans, winners of countless wars, dragged away like troops pulled off the battle line just as the enemy came in sight. If a province mattered more than Rome and the survival of the empire, then everyone should follow them there; but if victory, sound judgment, the whole support and pillar of their cause rested in Italy, then the strongest limbs shouldn't be torn from the body.

31| While they were shouting this defiantly, Valens sent in his lictors to put down the disturbance — and the soldiers turned on him instead, throwing stones, chasing him as he fled. Shouting that he was hiding the plunder of Gaul and the gold of Vienne, the wages of their labor, they ripped open the baggage, tore apart the commander's tent, and probed the very ground with spears and lances — for Valens was hiding, disguised in a slave's clothes, at a cavalry officer's quarters. Then Alfenus Varus, the camp prefect, as the mutiny gradually burned itself out, added a shrewd move: he forbade the centurions to make their rounds and stopped the trumpet call that summoned soldiers to duty. So everyone went still, staring at one another in bewilderment, and frightened above all by the very fact that no one was in command. Through silence, patience, and finally prayers and tears, they sought pardon. And when Valens himself appeared, disheveled, weeping, alive against all expectation, joy and pity and goodwill swept through them: as mobs do, swinging wildly from one extreme to the other, they broke into celebration — cheering him, embracing him, ringing him round with the eagles and standards, then bearing him off to the tribunal. He, wisely restrained, demanded punishment for no one, and to avoid looking suspiciously indifferent, he blamed a few men by name — knowing well that in civil wars soldiers have more license than their commanders.

32| While they were fortifying camp at Ticinum, news came of Caecina's defeat, and the mutiny nearly flared up again — the men claiming that Valens's treachery and delays had kept them from the battle. They refused rest, wouldn't wait for their commander, pushed ahead of the standards, hurried the standard-bearers on; in a rapid march they joined up with Caecina's forces. Valens's reputation stood low with Caecina's army: they complained they'd been left exposed, so heavily outnumbered, against an enemy at full strength — while also, to excuse themselves, flatteringly exaggerating the strength of the reinforcements now arriving, so as not to be looked down on as beaten cowards. And though Valens actually had more men, nearly double the legions and auxiliaries, the soldiers' sympathies still leaned toward Caecina — not only for the generosity he was known for, but for his youthful vigor, his tall build, and a certain hollow popularity. From this came rivalry between the two commanders: Caecina mocked as disgraced and stained, the other as puffed-up and empty. But having buried their hatred, they nursed the same self-interest, both writing frequent letters heaping abuse on Otho with no thought of ever being pardoned — while Otho's own commanders, for all the rich material for insult that Vitellius offered, held their tongues.

33| To be fair, before either man met his end — Otho earning a splendid reputation, Vitellius the foulest — people feared Vitellius's lazy self-indulgence less than Otho's blazing appetites. Otho carried the added weight of hatred and dread from Galba's murder; no one held the war's outbreak against Vitellius. Vitellius was thought disgraceful for his belly and his gluttony; Otho, for his extravagance, cruelty, and recklessness, was judged more dangerous to the state.

34| Once Caecina's and Valens's forces had joined, nothing further held the Vitellians back from fighting with everything they had. Otho, for his part, debated whether to drag the war out or risk everything on a battle.

35| Then Suetonius Paulinus, judging it worthy of his reputation — no one at the time was thought a shrewder military mind — argued the whole strategic case: delay favored them, haste favored the enemy. Vitellius's entire army had already arrived, he pointed out, with little left in reserve behind them, since the Gallic provinces were restless and it wouldn't do to strip the Rhine frontier bare with such hostile tribes ready to break across it. The British legions were tied down by an enemy and the sea; Spain wasn't overflowing with troops; Narbonese Gaul had just been shaken by a naval raid and a lost battle; Cisalpine Italy, hemmed in by the Alps and with no help by sea, was already stripped bare by the army's own passage through it. There was no grain to be found anywhere for that army, and an army can't be held together without supplies. The Germans, too — the fiercest troops the enemy had — wouldn't take it well if the war dragged into summer, their bodies softening, unused to the change of soil and climate. Many wars, fierce in their first rush, had fizzled out through delay and drawn-out waiting. On their own side, by contrast, everything was rich and reliable: Pannonia, Moesia, Dalmatia, the East, all with their armies intact; Italy, the capital itself, the Senate and people — names never truly dim, even when for a time overshadowed; public and private wealth, and vast sums of money, which in civil strife counted for more than the sword; troops either native to Italy's climate or used to the heat. The Po lay as a barrier before them; their cities were safe behind men and walls, and Placentia's successful defense had already proven none of them would fall to the enemy. So — let the war be drawn out. Within a few days the Fourteenth Legion, itself of great renown, would arrive with the Moesian forces; then they could deliberate again, and if battle still seemed wise, fight it with greater strength.

36| Marius Celsus backed Paulinus's view; as for Annius Gallus — laid up for several days now after a fall from his horse — the messengers sent to sound him out reported that he held the same opinion. Otho leaned toward fighting it out at once. His brother Titianus and the Praetorian prefect Proculus, rushing ahead out of sheer inexperience, kept insisting that fortune, the gods, and Otho's own guiding spirit stood behind his plans and would favor his efforts — and no one dared speak against them, since everyone else had slid into flattery. Once battle was decided on, the question was whether the emperor should be present at the fighting or kept out of it. Paulinus and Celsus no longer objected, not wanting to seem to be exposing the emperor to danger — and it was those same authors of the worse advice, Titianus and Proculus, who pushed Otho to withdraw to Brixellum, to keep himself out of the uncertainty of battle and preserve himself for the larger business of empire. That was the first day that crippled Otho's cause: a strong force of Praetorian cohorts, scouts, and cavalry left with him, and the spirit of those who stayed behind was broken, since the commanders were now under suspicion, and Otho — the one man the soldiers trusted — had, by trusting only soldiers himself, left the generals' authority hanging in doubt.

37| None of this escaped the Vitellians, thanks to the frequent desertions typical of civil war, and their scouts, probing with equal eagerness on both sides, made no secret of their business. Caecina and Valens stayed calm and watchful — since the enemy was rushing to ruin through recklessness, which passed for wisdom on their part, they simply waited for the other side's folly to run its course. They began building a bridge, pretending to force a crossing of the Po against the gladiator unit stationed opposite, both to keep up appearances and to keep their own men from idling. Ships were set at equal intervals from one another, lashed together with sturdy timbers on both sides and pointed upstream, anchors thrown out to hold the bridge steady — but the anchor cables were left slack so that as the river rose, the line of boats could rise with it unhindered. A tower was set up to close off the bridge, built out on the last ship, from which catapults and siege engines could drive the enemy back. The Othonians on the bank built a tower of their own, and hurled stones and firebrands.

38| There was an island in the middle of the river, which the gladiators tried to reach by boat while the Germans swam across ahead of them. As it happened, a good number had gotten across when Macer, filling Liburnian galleys with his best gladiators, attacked them. But gladiators don't have the same steadiness in a fight as soldiers, and striking from boats that pitched under them, they couldn't land blows as well as men standing firm on the bank. As the rowers and fighters, thrown into confusion by the various panicked lurches, got tangled together, the Germans leapt down into the shallows on their own, seized the sterns, climbed onto the decks, or grappled men down into the water at close range — all of it in full view of both armies, and the more it delighted the Vitellians, the more bitterly the Othonians cursed the man responsible for the disaster.

39| The fight ended when the remaining ships were cut loose and the men fled. Macer was marked for death, and once he had been wounded from a distance by a lance, men had already rushed at him with drawn swords, when tribunes and centurions rushed in and shielded him. Not long after, Vestricius Spurinna, on Otho's orders, left a small garrison at Placentia and came up with his cohorts. Otho then sent Flavius Sabinus, the consul-designate, to take command of the forces Macer had led — the soldiers glad at the change of commanders, and the commanders themselves, given how often mutinies had made the post so dangerous, just as glad to be rid of it.

40| I find in some authors that dread of war, or disgust with both emperors—whose crimes and disgraces were becoming more openly known every day—made the armies hesitate: should they lay down the contest and settle things among themselves, or leave the senate to choose an emperor? And that this made the Othonian commanders favor delay, with special hope placed in Paulinus, since he was the most senior of the consulars and had won fame and a name in the British campaigns through his soldiering. I would grant that a few, in a silent wish, preferred peace to discord, and wanted a good and blameless emperor instead of the two worst and most disgraceful men alive. But I do not think that Paulinus, wise as he was, could have hoped for such restraint from the mob in so corrupt an age—that men who had disturbed peace out of love of war would lay down war out of love of peace. Nor could armies so different in speech and habits have come together in such agreement, nor would the legates and commanders—most of them guilty in their own consciences of extravagance, poverty, and crime—have tolerated any emperor who was not himself tainted and bound to them by favors owed.

41| The old craving for power, long planted in human hearts, grew along with the size of the empire and finally burst out. When resources were modest, equality was easy to maintain. But once the world had been subdued and rival cities and kings destroyed, so that men had leisure to covet wealth without fear, the first struggles broke out between senate and people. Now turbulent tribunes, now overbearing consuls, and in the city and forum the first trials of civil war. Then, from the lowest ranks, Gaius Marius, and from the nobility the most savage of all, Lucius Sulla, turned liberty, defeated by arms, into domination. After them came Gnaeus Pompey, more secretive but no better, and from then on the fight was never about anything but supreme power. The citizen legions did not lay down their arms after Pharsalus or Philippi—so how much less likely were the armies of Otho and Vitellius to give up war of their own will? The same anger of the gods, the same madness of men, the same causes of crime drove them into discord. That these wars were each settled in a single blow was due to the cowardice of the emperors involved. But this reflection on old and new customs has carried me too far. Now I return to the order of events.

42| After Otho left for Brixellum, the honor of command belonged to his brother Titianus, but the actual power and authority lay with the prefect Proculus. Celsus and Paulinus, whose good judgment no one made use of, were held out as commanders in name only, screens for blame that belonged to others. The tribunes and centurions were uncertain, resentful that the worst men prevailed while the better ones were despised. The soldiers were eager, but preferred to interpret their commanders' orders rather than simply carry them out. It was decided to move the camp forward to the fourth milestone from Bedriacum—so incompetently that, though it was springtime and rivers surrounded them on every side, the men suffered from lack of water. There they hesitated over whether to fight: Otho kept demanding by letter that they hurry, while the soldiers demanded that their emperor be present for the battle. Most called for the forces stationed across the Po to be summoned. It is hard to say what would have been the best course, only that what was actually done could hardly have been worse.

43| They set out not as if to fight a battle but as if merely to make war, heading for the meeting point of the Po and the Adda, sixteen miles off. Celsus and Paulinus objected: the soldiers were worn out from the march and weighed down with baggage—why hand them over to an enemy who would not fail to attack them, unencumbered and having advanced barely four miles, while they were either strung out in column or scattered and building a rampart? But Titianus and Proculus, once outvoted in council, fell back on their formal authority to overrule. A Numidian courier arrived at a gallop with a harsh message: Otho, sick of the delay and unable to bear the suspense, rebuked the commanders' slowness and ordered that the matter be brought to a decision at once.

44| That same day two tribunes of the praetorian cohorts came to Caecina, who was busy with his bridge-building, asking for a conference. He was preparing to hear their terms and offer his own when scouts rushed in reporting the enemy was near. The conversation with the tribunes broke off, leaving it unclear whether they had been attempting treachery, or betrayal, or some honorable plan. Caecina sent the tribunes away and rode back to camp, where he found the signal for battle already given by order of Fabius Valens, and the men under arms. While the legions were still sorting out their marching order, the cavalry burst forward—and, remarkable to say, though outnumbered, the Vitellian horse, routed by fewer Othonians, was kept from being driven back onto its own rampart only by the courage of the Italic legion, which at swordpoint forced the fugitives to turn and renew the fight, which drove them back at swordpoint and forced the fight to resume. The Vitellian legions formed their line without alarm, for though the enemy was close, the thick woods hid them from sight. Among the Othonians the commanders were panicked, the soldiers hostile to their commanders, the wagons and camp-followers all mixed together, and with ditches cut steep on both sides of the road, the way was narrow even for a column marching calmly. Some men crowded around their standards, others hunted for them; a confused shouting rose from every side as men ran up calling out to each other. Wherever boldness or fear took them, they surged toward the front line or the rear, or fell back again.

45| Minds already shaken by sudden terror turned false joy into paralysis, when some men were found spreading the lie that the Vitellian army had gone over to Otho's side. Whether this rumor was spread by Vitellius's scouts or arose within Otho's own ranks, by trickery or by accident, is not established. The Othonians, their fighting spirit dropped, went so far as to greet the enemy as friends—and were answered with hostile murmurs. Since most of their own men had no idea why the greeting was given, it bred fear of betrayal. Then the enemy line, still in unbroken order and superior in strength and numbers, bore down on them. The Othonians, though scattered, fewer, and exhausted, still took up the fight fiercely. In terrain broken by trees and vineyards, the battle took many shapes at once: they clashed hand to hand and at a distance, in bands and in wedge formations. On the raised roadway they closed ranks and pushed shield-boss against shield-boss, abandoned throwing their javelins, and hacked through helmets and breastplates with swords and axes. Recognizing each other, visible to all the rest, they fought as if the outcome of the whole war hung on them alone.

46| By chance, in the open plain between the Po and the road, two legions met: on Vitellius's side the Twenty-first, known as the Rapax, distinguished by old glory; on Otho's side the First Adiutrix, never before led into battle but fierce and hungry for a first taste of honor. Slashing through the Twenty-first's front line, the First's men seized its eagle outright. The disgrace stung, and the Twenty-first hit back hard, cutting down the First's commander Orfidius Benignus and hauling off a great many of the enemy's standards and banners. Elsewhere the Thirteenth legion was pushed back by the charge of the Fifth, and the men of the Fourteenth were surrounded by the rush of several legions together. Otho's commanders had long since fled the field, but Caecina and Valens strengthened their own men with reserves. Fresh support arrived too—Alfenus Varus with the Batavian cohorts, who scattered a band of gladiators. These men had been ferried across by ship, but cohorts posted to block them slaughtered them right in the river. So, victorious, the Batavians struck the enemy's flank.

47| With the center of their line broken through, the Othonians fled in every direction, making for Bedriacum. The distance was immense, and the roads were choked with piles of bodies—which only made the slaughter worse, since in civil wars prisoners are not turned into plunder. Suetonius Paulinus and Licinius Proculus took separate routes and avoided the camp altogether. Vedius Aquila, commander of the Thirteenth legion, was delivered by his own reckless panic straight into the soldiers' fury. Entering the rampart while it was still broad daylight, he was surrounded by the shouting of mutineers and fugitives; they held back neither insults nor blows, calling him deserter and traitor—not because of any particular crime of his, but in the way of the mob, each man throwing his own disgrace onto someone else. Night saved Titianus and Celsus, for by then the watches had been posted and the soldiers restrained—Annius Gallus had won them over with advice, appeals, and the weight of his authority, urging them not to add slaughter of their own to the disaster of a lost battle, whether the war was now over or they chose to take up arms again: unity was the one comfort left to the defeated. The rest were broken in spirit. The praetorian soldiers grumbled that they had been beaten not by courage but by betrayal: even the Vitellians, they said, had not won without bloodshed—their cavalry had been driven off, one of their legion's eagles taken. There were still the troops that remained with Otho across the Po; the Moesian legions were on their way; a large part of the army had stayed behind at Bedriacum. These, at least, were not yet defeated, and if it came to that, it would be more honorable to die in battle. Fierce or fearful with such thoughts, and driven by utter desperation, they were spurred more often to rage than to fear.

48| The Vitellian army, meanwhile, halted five miles from Bedriacum, its commanders not daring to attack the camp that same day; besides, they hoped for a voluntary surrender. But the men had marched out light, equipped only for battle, and their weapons and their victory were rampart enough. The next day the will of the Othonian army was in no doubt, and those who had been fiercest before now leaned toward regret, so a delegation was sent. Among the Vitellian commanders there was no hesitation about granting peace. The envoys were held back for a while, and this delay caused uneasiness among men who did not yet know whether they had succeeded. Then the delegation was sent back, and the rampart was thrown open. At that, victors and vanquished alike broke into tears, cursing the fate of civil war even amid their wretched joy. In the same tents, some men tended the wounds of brothers, others of relatives. Hope and reward were uncertain; death and grief were certain, and no one was so free of loss that he did not mourn some death. The body of the legate Orfidius was recovered and cremated with the usual honors; a few men buried their own kin; the rest of the common dead were left lying on the ground.

49| Otho waited for news of the battle without fear, his mind made up. First came grim rumors, then fugitives from the field revealing the ruin outright. The soldiers' fervor did not wait for their commander's word: they told him to keep his spirits up — fresh forces still remained, and they themselves were ready to suffer and dare anything to the end. It was no flattery: they burned to march into battle, to revive their party's fortune with something like frenzy and inspiration. Those standing farther off stretched out their hands; those nearer clutched his knees, Plotius Firmus foremost among them. He, the praetorian prefect, begged again and again that Otho not abandon so loyal an army, soldiers who had deserved so well of him: it took more courage to endure misfortune than to walk away from it; the brave and vigorous held to hope even against fortune, while the timid and cowardly rushed into despair out of fear. As Otho's face softened or hardened at these words, cries and groans answered him. And it was not only the praetorians, Otho's own household troops, but men sent ahead from Moesia who reported the same stubborn resolve in the army now approaching, and that the legions had already reached Aquileia — so that no one could doubt the grim war might have been renewed, mournful and uncertain for winners and losers alike.

50| But Otho himself, turned away from plans for war, said: 'This spirit of yours, this courage — to throw it into further danger seems to me too high a price to pay for my life. The more hope you show me, if I chose to live, the more glorious my death will be. Fortune and I have had our trial of each other. Do not measure it by how long it lasted: it is harder to master good fortune you don't expect to keep for long. This civil war began with Vitellius, and it was he who started the armed contest over the principate. That we should fight it more than once will not be my example to set — let posterity judge Otho by this. Vitellius keeps his brother, his wife, his children — I want no revenge, and I need no comfort. Others have gripped power for longer stretches than I did, but none will have laid it down with more courage. Shall I let so much of Rome's youth, so many fine armies, be cut down again and torn from the republic? Let that spirit die with mine — treat it as though you had already given your lives for me — but you, go on living. Let us not delay: I your safe departure, you my resolve. To say more about the end is itself a kind of cowardice. Take this as the surest proof of my resolve: that I blame no one. To accuse gods or men is the business of someone who wants to go on living.'

51| Having said this, he spoke kindly to each man according to his age or rank, telling them to leave quickly and not sharpen the victor's anger by lingering. He moved the young with authority, the old with pleading — his face calm, his words fearless, checking his men's ill-timed tears. He ordered ships and carriages given to those departing; he destroyed petitions and letters marked by devotion to himself or insults against Vitellius; he distributed money sparingly, not as a man about to die. Then he turned to comfort Salvius Cocceianus, his brother's son, still very young, who was frightened and grieving — praising his loyalty, chiding his fear: would Vitellius really be so pitiless that, in exchange for sparing his whole family, he would not grant even this one favor? By dying quickly, Otho said, he was earning the victor's clemency; for he had not given up the republic's last hope out of utter despair, but because his army demanded battle. He had won enough fame for himself, enough distinction for his descendants. After the Julii, the Claudii, the Servii, he was the first to bring imperial power to a new family. So the boy should take up life with confidence, and never forget — nor dwell too much — on the fact that Otho had been his uncle.

52| After this, once everyone had been sent away, he rested a while. But as he turned over his final thoughts, a sudden uproar interrupted him: word came of disorder and lawlessness among the soldiers, who were threatening those departing with death, showing especially savage violence toward Verginius, whom they besieged, shut up in his house. Otho rebuked the ringleaders of the unrest, then returned and gave his time to farewells with those leaving, until all had gone unharmed. When evening came he drank cold water to ease his thirst. Two daggers were then brought in; he tried the edge of each and slid one beneath his pillow. Having confirmed his friends had already left, he passed a quiet night — and, it is said, not a sleepless one. At first light he fell on the blade. At the dying man's groan, freedmen and slaves rushed in, along with Plotius Firmus the praetorian prefect, and found a single wound. His funeral was hurried; he had earnestly begged that his head not be cut off to become an object of mockery. The praetorian cohorts carried his body with praise and tears, kissing his wound and his hands. Some soldiers killed themselves beside his pyre, not from guilt or fear, but from a longing to match his glory and love for their commander. Afterward this kind of death became common at Bedriacum, Placentia, and other camps. A modest tomb, meant to last, was built for Otho. Such was the end of his life, in his thirty-seventh year.

53| He came from the town of Ferentium; his father had been consul, his grandfather praetor. His mother's family was of lesser rank but not disgraceful. His boyhood and youth were as we have described. By two acts — one utterly disgraceful, the other admirable — he earned with posterity as much good repute as bad. I would not stoop to gather up fanciful tales to entertain readers, which would be beneath the seriousness of this work, but neither would I dare to strip belief from what is widely reported and handed down. On the day the battle was fought at Bedriacum, people at Regium Lepidum recall that a bird of strange appearance settled in a crowded grove and neither the crowds pressing around it nor the other birds wheeling overhead could scare it off or drive it away, not until the very moment Otho took his own life — then it vanished from sight. And those who reckoned the timing found that the beginning and end of this wonder matched exactly with Otho's death.

54| At his funeral, the soldiers' grief and sorrow flared into renewed mutiny, and there was no one to check it. They turned on Verginius, alternately begging and threatening that he take up the command, or else go as their envoy to Caecina and Valens. Verginius slipped away by a back door of his house, evading them as they broke in. Rubrius Gallus carried the pleas of the cohorts that had been stationed at Brixellum, and pardon was granted at once, the troops he had commanded going over to the victor through Flavius Sabinus.

55| With the war laid to rest everywhere, much of the senate faced its most dangerous moment, having set out from Rome with Otho and then been left behind at Mutina. There the news of the defeat reached them; but the soldiers, dismissing it as a false rumor because they believed the senate was hostile to Otho, watched the senators' every word, twisted their looks and bearing into something sinister, and finally, with insults and abuse, sought grounds and a pretext for slaughter. The senators had another fear pressing on them besides: that with Vitellius's party now clearly dominant, they might be thought to have accepted his victory too grudgingly. So, anxious on both sides, they gathered together — no one felt safe working out a plan alone, but there was more safety among many sharing the same guilt. The town council of Mutina added to their worry, offering arms and money and addressing them as 'conscript fathers' with honors that were badly timed.

56| A notable quarrel arose when Licinius Caecina attacked Eprius Marcellus for speaking evasively. No one else was voicing an opinion openly; but Marcellus's name, hated for his career as an informer and exposed to general resentment, had provoked Caecina, still new to the senate and eager to make a name through a grand feud. Cooler heads separated them. All returned to Bononia to deliberate again, expecting meanwhile that more news would arrive. At Bononia, men were sent out along the roads to question anyone bringing the freshest word. One of Otho's freedmen, asked why he was leaving, answered that he carried his master's last instructions; Otho, he said, had been left alive, but caring only for the future and having cut himself off from life's comforts. This answer drew astonishment and left them too abashed to ask more, and the mood of everyone there swung toward Vitellius.

57| His brother Lucius Vitellius took part in their deliberations and began offering himself to those already flattering him, when suddenly Coenus, a freedman of Nero, threw everyone into panic with a shocking lie, insisting that the Fourteenth Legion, joined by forces from Brixellum, had arrived and cut down the victors, and that the tide of the war had turned. His motive for inventing this was to revive interest in Otho's now-neglected safe-conducts with more cheerful news. Coenus himself was rushed to Rome, and a few days later paid for it by Vitellius's order; but meanwhile the danger to the senators grew, since Otho's soldiers believed the false report to be true. Their fear was heightened because their withdrawal from Mutina, under the guise of an official decision, looked like the desertion of Otho's cause. They no longer met as a body but each looked to his own safety, until letters sent by Fabius Valens relieved their fear. And the news of Otho's death, the more praiseworthy it was, traveled all the faster.

58| At Rome, meanwhile, there was no alarm; the Games of Ceres were watched as usual. When reliable witnesses brought word to the theater that Otho had given up, and that Flavius Sabinus, prefect of the city, had sworn the troops stationed in Rome to Vitellius's name, the crowd broke into applause for Vitellius; people bore Galba's images through the temples decked in laurel and flowers, heaping garlands into a mound by the Curtian Lake, the spot where Galba, dying, had stained the ground with his blood. In the senate, every honor that had taken long reigns to accumulate for other emperors was voted at once; they added praise and thanks for the army of Germany and sent a delegation to share in the rejoicing. Letters from Fabius Valens to the consuls were read aloud, written without excessive pretension; Caecina's restraint in not having written at all was received even more favorably.

59| But Italy suffered worse and more savagely than in the war itself. Vitellius's men, scattered through the towns and colonies, plundered, robbed, and defiled with violence and rape. Greedy or venal, they respected nothing sacred or profane in their pursuit of gain. Some even killed personal enemies under the pretext of being soldiers. And the soldiers themselves, who knew the country, marked out fertile fields and rich landowners for plunder — or for destruction, if resisted — while their commanders, compromised, did not dare stop them. Caecina was less greedy but more vain; Valens was notorious for graft and profit, and for that reason overlooked the crimes of others too. Italy's resources, already worn thin, could barely bear the weight, damage, and abuse of so many infantry and cavalry.

60| Meanwhile Vitellius, not yet knowing of his victory, kept drawing the remaining forces of the German armies to him as if for a fresh war. Only a few veterans were left in winter quarters, while hasty levies were made throughout Gaul to fill out the names of the depleted legions. Guarding the Rhine frontier was left to Hordeonius Flaccus; Vitellius himself took eight thousand picked men from the army of Britain. After marching only a few days he learned that the battle at Bedriacum had gone well and that the war had collapsed with Otho's death. He called an assembly and heaped praise on his soldiers' courage. When the army asked him to grant his freedman Asiaticus equestrian rank, he refused the shameless flattery — but then, true to his fickle character, granted it privately at a dinner party that same thing he had publicly declined, and honored Asiaticus with the equestrian ring, a vile slave who had risen by disgraceful methods.

61| In those same days word arrived that both Mauretanias had joined his side, after the killing of the procurator Albinus. Lucceius Albinus, appointed by Nero over Mauretania Caesariensis and later given charge of Tingitana under Galba as well, commanded no negligible force — nineteen cohorts, five cavalry wings, and a huge number of Moorish irregulars, a band well suited to war through habits of raiding and plunder. After Galba's murder he had leaned toward Otho, and not content with Africa, he was eyeing Spain across the narrow strait. This alarmed Cluvius Rufus, who ordered the tenth legion to move toward the coast as if to cross over, and sent centurions ahead to win the Moors over to Vitellius. It wasn't hard — the German army's reputation ran high in the provinces. It was also rumored that Albinus, scorning the title of procurator, had taken to using the royal insignia and the name of Juba.

62| With loyalties shifting, Asinius Pollio, commander of a cavalry wing and one of Albinus's most trusted men, was overpowered, along with Festus and Scipio, the cohort commanders. Albinus himself, while crossing from Tingitana to Mauretania Caesariensis, was cut down as he came ashore; his wife, who threw herself before the killers, was slaughtered along with him. Vitellius made no inquiry into any of it — he passed lightly over even great matters, unequal to weightier concerns.

63| He ordered the army to march overland while he himself sailed down the Saône, with none of the pomp of a ruler, but conspicuous instead for his old poverty — until Junius Blaesus, governor of Gallia Lugdunensis, of noble birth, generous in spirit and wealth to match, surrounded the emperor with a proper retinue and accompanied him lavishly. For this very generosity Blaesus earned Vitellius's ingratitude, though Vitellius masked his hatred with servile flattery. At Lyon the leaders of both the winning and the losing sides came to pay respects. Vitellius praised Valens and Caecina before an assembly and seated them on either side of his curule chair. Then he ordered the whole army to march out to meet his infant son; the boy was brought forward, and Vitellius, wrapping him in a general's cloak and holding him close, named him Germanicus and decked him out in every emblem of imperial rank. In prosperity the honor would have been excessive; amid disaster it became a kind of consolation.

64| Then the most spirited centurions of Otho's army were put to death — the chief cause of the deep hatred that turned the Illyrian legions against Vitellius. At the same time the other legions, infected by the same feeling and resentful toward the German soldiers, were already brewing rebellion. Suetonius Paulinus and Licinius Proculus he kept in miserable suspense, unwashed and shabby, until they were finally heard — and used defenses more expedient than honorable. They went so far as to claim credit for the defeat as if it were treachery: the long march before the battle, the exhaustion of Otho's men, the column tangled with baggage wagons — they attributed all these accidents to their own scheming. Vitellius believed the tale of treachery and pardoned them their loyalty. Salvius Titianus, Otho's brother, faced no danger at all, excused by his family loyalty and his sheer incompetence. Marius Celsus was confirmed in his consulship — though rumor held, and it was later raised in the Senate against Caecilius Simplex, that Simplex had tried to buy that office with money, at the cost of Celsus's life. Vitellius resisted the move and afterward gave Simplex the consulship anyway, untainted and unbought. Trachalus was shielded from his accusers by Galeria, Vitellius's wife.

65| Amid the crises of great men — shameful to record — a certain Mariccus, a commoner of the Boii, dared to thrust himself into the game of fortune and challenge Roman arms under the pretense of divine power. Already calling himself the champion of the Gauls and a god (for he had given himself that title), he had gathered eight thousand men and was ravaging the nearby districts of the Aedui, when that leading tribe, with picked young men reinforced by cohorts sent by Vitellius, scattered the fanatical mob. Mariccus was captured in the fighting; thrown afterward to wild beasts, he came through untorn, and the credulous mob took it as proof he could not be harmed — a belief that held only until Vitellius himself watched him put to death.

66| No further cruelty touched the rebels or what they owned: men who had died fighting for Otho had their wills upheld, and wherever no will existed, the ordinary rule of intestate succession took over. Indeed, if only Vitellius had restrained his gluttony, one need not have feared his greed. His appetite for feasting was foul and insatiable: delicacies were hauled in from Rome and all Italy, and the roads rang with traffic from both seas. The leading men of the towns were bled dry supplying his banquets; the towns themselves were laid waste; the soldiers grew soft, drifting from discipline and courage into a habit of pleasure and contempt for their commander. He sent an edict ahead to Rome postponing the title Augustus and declining Caesar, though he gave up none of the power itself. Astrologers were expelled from Italy; strict measures forbade Roman knights from disgracing themselves in gladiatorial games and the arena. Earlier emperors had driven knights to it with money, and more often by force, and many towns and colonies had likewise competed to lure the most corrupt of their young men into the arena with cash.

67| But Vitellius, made more arrogant and savage by his brother's arrival and by the tutors in tyranny now creeping close to him, ordered the killing of Dolabella, whom we noted earlier had been sent by Otho to the colony at Aquinum. Dolabella, on hearing of Otho's death, had entered Rome. Plancius Varus, a former praetor and one of Dolabella's closest friends, denounced him to Flavius Sabinus, the city prefect, claiming Dolabella had broken his confinement and put himself forward as a leader for the defeated cause; he further alleged that Dolabella had tried to win over a cohort stationed at Ostia. None of these grave charges was ever proved, and Varus, in something like remorse, sought a pardon too late, after the wrong was already done. While Flavius Sabinus hesitated over so weighty a matter, Triaria, wife of Lucius Vitellius — fiercer than any woman should be — frightened him into acting, warning that by risking the emperor's safety he would only be angling for a reputation for mercy. Sabinus, gentle by nature, but once fear took hold quick to change course, and — anxious for his own skin amid another man's peril — afraid of seeming to have shown him favor, pushed the doomed man on to his fate.

68| So Vitellius, driven by fear and by hatred — since Dolabella had gone on to marry his own former wife Petronia — summoned him by letter, had him avoid the busy Flaminian Way and turn aside to Interamna, and ordered him killed there. Even that seemed too long a wait to his executioner: he cut Dolabella's throat on the road, in a roadside tavern, throwing him to the ground — a killing that drew great resentment against the new regime, whose character was judged by this first token of it. And Triaria's ruthlessness was made to look worse by the restrained example set close beside her: Galeria, the emperor's wife, took no part in these grim doings; and with equal decency Sextilia, mother of the Vitellii, kept to the old ways. She was even said to have remarked, on reading her son's first letters as emperor, that she had borne a Vitellius, not a Germanicus. And afterward, unmoved by any lure of fortune or the city's flattery, her household felt only the hardships of her son's rise, never any joy in it.

69| As Vitellius left Lyon, Cluvius Rufus caught up with him, having left Spain behind, wearing an expression of joy and congratulation while inwardly anxious, knowing he was the target of accusations. Hilarus, a freedman of the emperor, had reported that on hearing of the joint rule of Vitellius and Otho, Cluvius had tried to seize power and possession of the Spanish provinces for himself, and had therefore left no emperor's name on official documents; Hilarus also read insults to Vitellius, and self-promoting appeals to the people, into certain passages of Cluvius's speeches. Cluvius's own standing prevailed, and Vitellius ordered his freedman punished instead. Cluvius was attached to the emperor's retinue, though Spain was not taken from him — he governed it in absence, following the precedent of Lucius Arruntius. But where Tiberius Caesar had kept Arruntius close out of fear, Vitellius kept Cluvius close without any such dread. Trebellius Maximus received no such honor: he had fled Britain because of the soldiers' anger, and Vettius Bolanus, chosen from those in the emperor's suite, was sent to replace him.

70| Vitellius was troubled that the defeated legions' spirit was nowhere near broken. Scattered through Italy and mixed in among the victors, they talked like enemies — the Fourteenth's men were especially fierce, refusing to admit defeat: at Bedriacum, they said, only their detachments had been beaten, the legion itself hadn't even set foot on the field. The decision was made to ship them back to Britain, the place Nero had first pulled them from, and meanwhile to quarter the Batavian cohorts together with them because of the old feud between the Batavians and the Fourteenth. Quiet didn't last long among men who hated each other so much under arms: at Augusta Taurinorum, a Batavian went after some craftsman as a cheat, a legionary defended him as his host, and their comrades rallied around each man and turned insults into killing. A savage battle would have broken out if two Praetorian cohorts hadn't taken the Fourteenth's side, giving them confidence and putting fear into the Batavians. Vitellius, trusting the Batavians, attached them to his own column, and ordered the legion to be marched over the Graian Alps by a route that avoided Vienne — the people of Vienne were also feared. The night the legion left, fires were left burning here and there and part of the colony of Turin was scorched — a loss that, like most wartime harm, was swallowed up by worse disasters elsewhere. Once the men of the Fourteenth came down from the Alps, the most rebellious of them wanted to carry their standards to Vienne; the better sort overruled them, and the legion was shipped over to Britain.

71| Vitellius's next worry was the Praetorian cohorts. First they were separated out, then, softened by the promise of an honorable discharge, they handed their weapons in to their tribunes — until word spread that Vespasian's war was growing. Then they took up service again and turned into the Flavian party's backbone. The First Legion of marines got shipped off to Spain to cool off in peace and idleness; the Eleventh and Seventh were returned to their old winter quarters; the Thirteenth was ordered to build amphitheaters — Caecina was preparing a gladiator show at Cremona, Valens one at Bononia. Vitellius was never so absorbed in his worries that he forgot his pleasures.

72| He had broken up the defeated side's forces with moderation; among the victors, though, a mutiny broke out — trivial in how it started, except that the number of dead made Vitellius look bad. Vitellius was dining at Ticinum with Verginius as his guest. Legates and tribunes take on the character of their commanders — some copy their strictness, some enjoy well-timed banquets; the soldiers follow suit, either disciplined or unruly. With Vitellius everything was disorderly, drunken, closer to an all-night bacchanal than to army discipline. So when two soldiers — one from the Fifth Legion, one a Gallic auxiliary — got worked up into a wrestling match for fun, and the legionary went down, the Gaul jeered, and the spectators split into rival camps, the legionaries burst out and slaughtered the auxiliaries — two cohorts were wiped out. The cure for one riot was another riot: dust and weapons were spotted in the distance, and a shout went up that the Fourteenth Legion had turned back to attack. In fact it was only the rear guard of the column; once recognized, the alarm died down. Meanwhile a slave of Verginius, met by chance, was accused of being Vitellius's would-be assassin, and the soldiers rushed to the banquet demanding Verginius's death. Even Vitellius, jumpy as he was about every suspicion, never doubted the man's innocence — but it was hard to hold back those baying for the death of a former consul and their own former commander. No one was attacked by every mutiny so often as Verginius: the men still admired him and his reputation, but hated him for it, the way people hate someone they feel looked down on by.

73| The next day Vitellius heard out the senate's delegation, which he'd made wait there, then went over to the camp and — unprompted — praised the soldiers' loyalty, while the auxiliaries grumbled that so much impunity and arrogance had been handed to the legionaries. The Batavian cohorts, to keep them from any rasher move, were sent back to Germany, just as fate was setting the stage for a war both civil and foreign at once. The Gallic auxiliary troops were returned to their home communities — a huge number, taken on right at the start of the revolt among the empty show of war. But so that the resources of an empire already drained by his handouts would stretch further, Vitellius ordered the legions and auxiliaries cut down, banned replacements, and offered discharges indiscriminately. This was ruinous for the state and unpopular with the soldiers, who found the same duties, dangers, and labor falling more often on fewer men; and their strength was being rotted by luxury, against the old discipline and the ways of their ancestors, under whom Rome's fortunes stood better on courage than on money.

74| From there Vitellius turned toward Cremona, and after watching Caecina's games he wanted to walk the plain of Bedriacum and see with his own eyes the traces of the recent victory — a foul, grim sight. Within forty days of the battle: mangled bodies, severed limbs, the rotting shapes of men and horses, ground soaked with gore, trees and crops crushed flat, a grim wasteland. Just as inhuman was that stretch of road, which the Cremonese had covered in laurel and roses, altars raised and victims slaughtered as though for a king — cheerful gestures for the moment that would soon bring ruin on the very people who made them. Valens and Caecina were there, pointing out the battle's landmarks: here the legions' column had broken through, here the cavalry had charged, there the auxiliary units had swarmed round; and now the tribunes and prefects, each puffing up his own part, mixed lies with truth or exaggerated the truth. The rank and file too turned off the road with shouts and cheers, taking in the ground where the fighting had raged, gawking at the heap of weapons and the piles of bodies, amazed; and some, moved by the shifting fortunes of life, felt tears and pity rise. But Vitellius did not turn his eyes away, did not shudder at so many thousands of unburied citizens: cheerful, indeed, and blind to how close his own fate lay, he went ahead and offered sacrifice to the local gods.

75| Next, at Bononia, Fabius Valens put on a gladiator show, with the trappings brought in from Rome. And the closer they got to the city, the more corrupt the march became, mixed in with actors, troops of eunuchs, and every other feature of Nero's court — for Vitellius even praised Nero himself, and used to follow him around when he sang, not out of necessity, the way most respectable men did, but bought and enslaved by gluttony and excess. So that he could open up vacant months of office for Valens and Caecina, other men's consulships were squeezed shorter, and Marcus Macer's claim was quietly passed over as a leader of the Othonian side; and he postponed Valerius Marinus, whom Galba had marked for consul — not out of any grudge, but because Marinus was mild and would take the insult without complaint. Pedanius Costa was dropped altogether — unwelcome to the emperor for having dared to move against Nero and for having spurred Verginius on — though other reasons were given publicly; and thanks were even offered to Vitellius for it, as servility had become the habit.

76| The lie started boldly but held up for only a handful of days. Someone had appeared claiming to be Scribonianus Camerinus, said to have been hidden away in Histria out of fear during Nero's reign, since the old Crassi family still had clients and estates there and the name still carried weight. So, with the worst sort of people recruited to back up the story, the credulous crowd and even some soldiers — whether genuinely fooled or eager for trouble — flocked to him competitively, until he was hauled before Vitellius and asked who on earth he was. When his story held no water and his own master recognized him — a runaway slave named Geta — he was punished for it the way a slave is punished.

77| It's hard to believe how much arrogance and laziness grew in Vitellius once scouts from Syria and Judaea reported that the East had sworn allegiance to him. For even though the reports were still vague and their sources uncertain, Vespasian's name was already on everyone's lips and in the air, and Vitellius was repeatedly stirred up just by hearing it: then he and his army, as though they had no rival, broke out in cruelty, lust, and plunder, degenerating into foreign ways.

78| Vespasian, meanwhile, was surveying the war and its forces, near and far. His own soldiers were so ready that they listened in silence as he led them through the oath and prayers for Vitellius's good fortune. Mucianus's feelings were not hostile to Vespasian, and leaned more toward Titus; the prefect of Egypt, Tiberius Alexander, had joined the plan; the Third Legion counted itself as Vespasian's own, having transferred from Syria to Moesia; the rest of the Illyrian legions were expected to follow — the whole army had been inflamed by the arrogance of the soldiers coming from Vitellius, who, being fierce in build and rough in speech, mocked the others as no match for them. But in so vast an undertaking, hesitation was common; and Vespasian was sometimes lifted into hope, sometimes weighing the risks: what would that day be like, when he committed his sixty years and his two young sons to war? Private ambitions could advance step by step, taking more or less from fortune as they pleased; but for men who want the throne, there is nothing in between the summit and the fall.

79| Before his eyes hovered the strength of the army of Germany, well known to a soldier like him: his own legions had no experience of civil war, Vitellius's were the victors, and among the defeated there was more complaint than actual strength. Loyalty worn thin by mutiny, and danger lurking in every man alone: what good would cohorts and cavalry wings do, if one or two men sought reward from the other side by some sudden act? So Scribonianus had been killed under Claudius, so his killer Volaginius had been promoted from the ranks to the top of the army: it's easier to sway a whole crowd than to guard against individuals.

80| Vespasian wavered under these fears, and the other officers and friends worked to steady him, Mucianus most of all — after many private conversations, now speaking openly: 'Everyone who takes up plans for great affairs ought to weigh whether what they're starting is good for the state, glorious for themselves, and either easy to carry out or at least not too hard. The man giving the advice also has to be weighed — does he add his own risk to the plan, and if fortune favors the venture, who gets the highest honor from it? I am calling you to power, Vespasian — power that is as good for the state as it is magnificent for you, and, next to the gods, lies in your own hands. Don't shrink from this as flattery: being chosen after Vitellius is closer to an insult than a compliment. We are not rising against the sharp mind of the deified Augustus, nor the cautious old age of Tiberius, nor even against a house made secure by the long reigns of Gaius or Claudius or Nero — you stepped aside even for the portraits of Galba. To keep lying low now, while the state is fouled and ruined, looks like nothing but sleep and cowardice — even if servitude were as safe for you as it is shameful. Whatever chance you had of seeming not to want this is already gone, past. You must take refuge in power. Have you forgotten Corbulo, butchered? He was of more brilliant birth than we are, I admit — but Nero too outranked Vitellius in noble blood. Whoever is feared is famous enough to the man who fears him. And Vitellius himself is proof that an emperor can be made by an army: he had no service record, no military reputation, he was raised up by hatred of Galba. Even Otho was beaten not by generalship or military force but by his own premature despair — and that has already made him seem, by comparison, a great and much-missed emperor. Meanwhile Vitellius scatters the legions, disarms the cohorts, and every day sows fresh seeds of war. Whatever fire and fierceness his soldiers had is wearing away in taverns, in drinking bouts, in aping their emperor. You have nine legions from Judea, Syria, and Egypt, untouched — none worn down in battle, none corrupted by mutiny, but soldiers hardened by real service and seasoned in a foreign war: the strength of fleets, cavalry wings, and cohorts, the most loyal client kings, and your own experience above everyone else's.'

81| 'For myself I will claim nothing beyond not being ranked after Valens and Caecina — but don't scorn Mucianus as your partner just because you don't find him a rival. I rank myself above Vitellius, and you above me. Your house has the name of triumph, two young sons — one already capable of ruling, and already known, in his first years of service, even to the armies stationed along the Rhine frontier. For me to withhold power from a man like you, whose son I'd adopt as my own if I wore the purple myself, would be absurd. Besides, our shares in success and failure won't be equal: if we win, I'll have whatever honor you grant me; the danger and the risk we'll bear equally. Better still — you command your armies, and leave the war and the uncertainties of battle to me. Today the defeated live under stricter discipline than the victors. Anger, hatred, the desire for revenge spur our side to courage; theirs grow dull through arrogance and contempt. This war itself will tear open and expose the wounds of the winning side, still covered over and festering. I have no more confidence in your vigilance, your restraint, your wisdom than I have in Vitellius's laziness, ignorance, and cruelty. But war serves our cause better than peace — men who stop to deliberate have already deserted him.'

82| After Mucianus's speech the others crowded around him with bolder encouragement, citing prophecies and reading the stars in his favor. Vespasian himself was not free of this superstition — once he ruled the world, he kept the astrologer Seleucus openly at his side as guide and forecaster. Old omens came back to his mind: a cypress tree on his estate, remarkably tall, had suddenly toppled, and the next day had risen again from the same spot, growing back tall and even fuller than before. The soothsayers agreed it was a great and favorable sign, promising the highest distinction to Vespasian, then still a young man. At first his triumphal honors, his consulship, and the glory of his victory in Judea seemed to have fulfilled the omen; but once he had achieved all that, he came to believe it foretold power itself. Between Judea and Syria lies Carmel — that is the name of both the mountain and the god. There is no statue of the god, nor any temple, so tradition has it — only an altar, and reverence. There, while Vespasian was sacrificing and turning over hidden hopes in his mind, the priest Basilides, after repeatedly examining the entrails, said: 'Whatever it is you are planning, Vespasian — whether to build a house, extend your land, or add to your slaves — you are granted a great seat, vast boundaries, and a great number of men.' This riddling answer had already been picked up by rumor, and now it was being spelled out openly; nothing was more talked about among the people. The conversations grew thicker around Vespasian himself, the more was said to men who were already hoping. With their course now firmly set, Mucianus left for Antioch, Vespasian for Caesarea — the one the capital of Syria, the other of Judea.

83| The move to bring imperial power to Vespasian began at Alexandria, where Tiberius Alexander acted swiftly, putting the legions under oath to him on the first of July. That day was afterward kept as the first day of his reign, though the legions in Judea had sworn allegiance on the third of July, so eager that they did not pause even for Titus, his son, then on his way back from Syria with messages passing between Mucianus and the father. The whole thing was done by the soldiers' own impulse, without a prepared assembly, without the legions even being gathered together.

84| While they were still looking for the right time and place, and for that hardest thing in such an affair — who would speak first — while hope and fear, calculation and chance, were all turning over in men's minds, Vespasian came out of his quarters. A few soldiers, standing in their usual order to greet him as their governor, hailed him instead as emperor. Then the rest came running up, piling on the titles Caesar, Augustus, and every name that belongs to imperial power. His mind passed from fear to fortune in a moment; in the man himself there was nothing swollen or arrogant, nothing new in this new turn of events. As soon as he had shaken off the daze that clouded his eyes at such a height, he spoke to the soldiers in plain military style and accepted all their joyful enthusiasm — for this was exactly what Mucianus had been waiting for, and he now put the eager soldiers under oath to Vespasian. Then Vespasian entered the theater at Antioch, where the people were used to holding their public discussions, and addressed the crowd streaming in and pouring out flattery — carrying it off well enough even in Greek, and showing in everything he said and did a certain calculated skill at performance. Nothing fired up the province and the army more than Mucianus's claim that Vitellius had decided to move the German legions to Syria, into rich and easy service, while sending the Syrian legions to the German winter quarters, harsh in climate and hardship. The provincials, after all, were happy with their familiar billeting of troops, many bound to the soldiers by ties of friendship and kinship, and the soldiers themselves loved their long-familiar camps like a second home.

85| Before the ides of July all of Syria had taken the same oath. Sohaemus joined them, bringing no negligible forces along with his kingdom, and Antiochus, immense in ancient wealth, the richest of the client kings. Soon Agrippa, summoned by secret messengers from his own men while Vitellius still knew nothing, hurried back from Rome by fast ship. Queen Berenice supported their cause with no less spirit, in the flower of youth and beauty, and welcome even to the aging Vespasian for the magnificence of her gifts. Every province washed by the sea as far as Asia and Achaea, and everything opening inland toward Pontus and Armenia, took the oath — but they were governed by legates without troops, since the legions had not yet been added to Cappadocia. A council on the whole state of affairs was held at Berytus. There Mucianus came with the legates and tribunes and the most distinguished of the centurions and soldiers, along with picked men chosen from the army in Judea; the sheer mass of infantry and cavalry gathered together, and the kings competing with one another in splendor, created the appearance of imperial majesty.

86| The first concern of the war was raising troops and recalling veterans. Strong cities were assigned to run weapons factories; at Antioch gold and silver coin was minted, and all these things were pushed forward through capable agents, each in its proper place. Vespasian himself went about in person, encouraging, praising the diligent, spurring on the slack more by example than by punishment, overlooking his friends' faults far more readily than their virtues. He honored many with prefectures and procuratorships, and many more with senatorial rank — outstanding men, most of whom went on to the highest offices; for a few, luck stood in for merit. As for the soldiers' bonus, Mucianus had shown only modest amounts at the first assembly, and even Vespasian offered no more in this civil war than others had given in peacetime — remarkably firm against the temptation to buy his soldiers, and his army was the better for it. Envoys were sent to the Parthians and to Armenia, and care was taken that, with the legions turned toward civil war, their rear should not be left exposed. It was decided that Titus should press on with the war in Judea, while Vespasian secured the gateways of Egypt; a portion of the forces, with Mucianus as commander and the mere name of Vespasian, seemed enough against Vitellius, since nothing is too hard for destiny. Letters were written to every army and every governor, with instructions to win over the praetorians who hated Vitellius with the promise of being restored to service.

87| Mucianus, moving with a light column and acting more like a partner in power than a subordinate, marched neither slowly, so as not to seem to be dragging his feet, nor fast either—he let the distance itself feed his reputation, knowing his real strength was modest and that people credit absent forces with more than they have. But the Sixth Legion and thirteen thousand picked troops followed behind in a huge column. He had ordered the fleet brought from the Black Sea to Byzantium, still undecided whether to bypass Moesia and seal off Dyrrachium with infantry and cavalry, while also closing the sea route to Italy with his warships, leaving Achaia and Asia safe behind him—provinces that would be exposed to Vitellius unless garrisoned—and keeping Vitellius himself unsure which part of Italy to defend, if hostile fleets threatened Brundisium, Tarentum, and the coasts of Calabria and Lucania at once.

88| So the provinces rang with the building of ships, the arming of soldiers, the mustering of weapons—but nothing wore people down like the hunt for money. Mucianus kept saying money was the sinew of civil war, and in hearing cases he looked not at justice or truth but only at the size of a man's fortune. Informers swarmed everywhere, and every wealthy man became prey. These abuses were harsh and hard to bear, but they were excused by the demands of war—and they outlasted the war, continuing even in peacetime, though Vespasian himself, early in his reign, was slower to indulge such injustices, until fortune's favors and bad advisers taught him to dare it too. Mucianus also funded the war from his own pocket, generous with his private wealth precisely so he could draw more greedily on the public purse. Others followed his example of contributing money, but almost none matched his freedom in taking it back.

89| Meanwhile Vespasian's cause was accelerated by the eagerness of the Illyrian armies to change sides. The Third Legion set the example for the other legions in Moesia; so did the Eighth and the Seventh Claudian, both steeped in loyalty to Otho, though they had missed his battle. Having advanced to Aquileia, they drove off the couriers bringing news of Otho's defeat, tore up the standards bearing Vitellius's name, and finally seized money and divided it among themselves—acting like an army at war with its own side. Fear followed, and from fear came calculation: what needed excusing under Vitellius could be credited to Vespasian instead. So the three Moesian legions began writing letters to win over the Pannonian army, and prepared to force those who refused. In this upheaval Aponius Saturninus, governor of Moesia, dared a monstrous crime: he sent a centurion to kill Tettius Julianus, commander of the Seventh Legion, over personal grudges he dressed up as loyalty to the cause. Julianus, learning of the danger and guided by locals who knew the country, fled through the Moesian wilderness beyond Mount Haemus. He took no further part in the civil war, dragging out his journey toward Vespasian through various delays, hesitating or hurrying depending on the news he heard.

90| In Pannonia, meanwhile, the Thirteenth Legion and the Seventh Galbian, still nursing their grief and rage over Bedriacum, went over to Vespasian without hesitation, driven above all by Antonius Primus. This man, guilty under the laws and convicted of forgery under Nero, had—among the war's other evils—won back his senatorial rank. Placed by Galba in command of the Seventh Legion, he was believed to have written to Otho offering himself as a leader for his cause; Otho ignored him, and he played no part in that war. But as Vitellius's fortunes crumbled, he joined Vespasian and added real weight to his cause—vigorous in action, quick with words, skilled at sowing hatred against others, powerful in stirring discord and mutiny, a plunderer, a spendthrift, worthless in peace but not to be underestimated in war. The combined Moesian and Pannonian armies then drew in the Dalmatian troops as well, though the consular governors did nothing to stir up trouble. Tampius Flavianus held Pannonia and Pompeius Silvanus held Dalmatia—both rich old men. But there was also the procurator Cornelius Fuscus, a man in the vigor of youth and of distinguished birth. In his early youth, out of a longing for a quiet life, he had given up his senatorial rank; later he led his home colony in support of Galba, and through that service gained his procuratorship. Taking up Vespasian's cause, he carried the fiercest torch for war—not so much delighted by the rewards of danger as by danger itself, preferring new, uncertain, risky ventures to safe and long-held certainties. So he and Antonius set about stirring and shaking every sore spot they could find anywhere. Letters went out to Britain's Fourteenth Legion and to Spain's First, both of which had stood with Otho against Vitellius; more letters spread through the Gallic provinces; and within moments a full-scale war was catching fire, the Illyrian armies breaking away in the open while the rest waited to see which way fortune leaned.

91| While all this was happening in the provinces under Vespasian and his party's commanders, Vitellius grew more contemptible and more sluggish by the day, stopping to enjoy every pleasant town and villa along the way as he made for Rome with a heavy, slow-moving column. Sixty thousand armed men followed him, their discipline ruined by license; the crowd of camp servants was even larger, and among the slaves the sutlers' hangers-on were the most shameless of all. The huge retinue of commanders and friends would have been unmanageable even under the strictest discipline. The mass swelled further with senators and knights who came out from the city to meet him—some out of fear, many out of flattery, and the rest, gradually, everyone, simply so as not to be the ones left behind while others went. From the disreputable classes came men known to Vitellius through their service to his vices—clowns, actors, charioteers—in whose degrading company he took strange delight. Not only towns and municipalities were drained by the gathering of supplies, but the farmers themselves and their fields, ripe now with the harvest, were plundered as if this were enemy soil.

92| There were many savage killings among the soldiers themselves, the discord between legionaries and auxiliaries persisting after it first broke out at Ticinum—though when it came to fighting civilians, they were all in agreement. The worst slaughter happened seven miles from Rome. There Vitellius handed out prepared food to the soldiers one by one, like fattening gladiators for the ring, and the crowd poured out and mixed freely through the whole camp. Some of them—with the crude wit typical of city dwellers—robbed the unwary soldiers, cutting their belts off in secret and then asking, mockingly, whether they were even wearing one. The soldiers' pride couldn't stand the insult of being mocked, and they fell on the unarmed crowd with swords. Among others killed was a father accompanying his soldier son; he was later recognized, and once word of the killing spread, the troops held back from harming the innocent. Still, panic gripped the city as soldiers scattered in every direction; the Forum drew them above all, everyone wanting a look at the place where Galba had died. And the soldiers were a frightening sight in their own right—shaggy in animal pelts, loaded down with huge weapons, shoving clumsily through crowds they scarcely bothered to dodge—and whenever they slipped on the wet stones or knocked into someone, cursing gave way fast to fists, then to swords. Even the tribunes and prefects went darting about in terror, trailed by armed gangs.

93| Vitellius himself, riding a splendid horse from the Milvian Bridge, in full military cloak and armed, drove the senate and people ahead of him. Talked out by his friends from entering the city as though it were a captured town, he put on the toga praetexta instead and marched in with his column in proper order. The eagles of four legions went in front, with the standards of other legions' detachments beside them in equal number; then came the standards of twelve cavalry wings, and behind them cavalry riding after the ranks of infantry; then thirty-four cohorts, arranged by nationality or type of arms. In front of the eagles marched the camp prefects, tribunes, and senior centurions, dressed in white; the rest marched beside their own centuries, gleaming with arms and decorations, and the soldiers' medals and neck-chains shone bright. It was a splendid sight—an army too fine for an emperor like Vitellius. In this style he entered the Capitol, and there, embracing his mother, honored her with the title of Augusta.

94| The following day, speaking as though the senate and people before him belonged to some other city entirely, he gave a lofty speech in his own honor, extolling his diligence and self-restraint—though the men in the room, and all of Italy, which had watched him march through in a disgraceful fog of sleep and excess, knew otherwise. Even so, the common crowd, free of real cares and blind to the difference between truth and flattery, shouted its usual applause on cue. And though he refused the title of Augustus, they pressed it on him until he took it—as pointlessly as he had refused it in the first place.

95| Among a people that reads omens into everything, it was taken as a mark of doom that Vitellius, on becoming Pontifex Maximus, issued his decree on religious ceremonies on the fifteenth day before the Kalends of August—a date long held unlucky since the disasters at the Cremera and the Allia. So utterly ignorant was he of all law, human and divine, and so were his freedmen and friends in their carelessness, that he governed as if surrounded by drunks. Yet he presided over the consular elections with the candidates in a show of civility, and played at courting every rumor of the lowest rabble—spectator in the theater, partisan in the circus. These might have been charming, popular touches if they had sprung from real virtue; given the memory of his past life, they seemed shabby and cheap instead. He kept coming to the senate, even when the matters under discussion were trivial. It happened once that Helvidius Priscus, praetor-elect, voted against his wishes. Vitellius was angered at first, but did no more than call on the tribunes of the plebs to defend his slighted authority; then, when friends who feared a deeper anger in him worked to calm him down, he said nothing new had happened—it was normal for two senators to disagree in public affairs; he himself, he said, had often spoken against Thrasea. Most people mocked the shamelessness of the comparison; others were pleased precisely because he had chosen, not one of the powerful, but Thrasea, as his model of true glory.

96| Vitellius had put Publilius Sabinus, formerly a cohort prefect, and Julius Priscus, then a centurion, in command of the Praetorians. Priscus owed his standing to Valens, Sabinus to Caecina; between the two rivals Vitellius himself had no authority at all. Caecina and Valens ran the business of empire, and their old mutual resentment—badly hidden even during the campaign and in camp, and swollen by the corruption of their friends and by a city fertile ground for breeding hatreds—now grew as they competed and were compared, jockeying for followers, retinues, and vast crowds of well-wishers, with Vitellius's favor tilting first to one, then the other. Power shared is never trusted enough when it runs too high. And they despised Vitellius himself even as they feared him—unpredictable as he was, given to sudden fits of anger or badly timed flattery. None of this made them slower to seize palaces, gardens, and the wealth of empire, while a tearful, destitute crowd of nobles—the very men and their children whom Galba had restored to their country—got no help at all from the emperor's pity. The leading men of the state were pleased, and even the common people approved, that he had granted returning exiles the legal rights over their own freedmen—though servile natures found every way to corrupt even that, hiding money in secret or ingratiating pockets, and some freedmen actually moved into Caesar's own household and grew more powerful than their former masters.

97| The camp was packed, the men overflowing into the porticoes, temples, and every part of the city, wandering loose. They did not know their own headquarters, did not keep watch, were not toughened by work. Through the city's temptations and things shameful to name, they wasted their bodies in idleness and their minds in lust. Finally, careless even of their health, a large number pitched tents in the notoriously unhealthy Vatican district, and deaths among the ranks followed thick and fast. With the Tiber right there, the Germans and Gauls, bodies already prone to sickness, wore themselves down further with their thirst for the river and their inability to bear the heat. On top of this the whole structure of the service was thrown into disorder by favoritism and corruption: sixteen praetorian and four urban cohorts were being enrolled, each meant to hold a thousand men. Valens took more liberties in this recruiting, as if he alone had rescued Caecina from danger. It's true his arrival had strengthened their cause, and a bad rumor about his slow march had been turned around by a successful battle. All the troops of Lower Germany attached themselves to Valens, which is thought to be the first crack in Caecina's loyalty.

98| But Vitellius did not favor his generals so much that the ordinary soldier got less license. Every man chose his own service: however unworthy, if he wanted it, he could get himself enrolled in the urban cohorts; and, conversely, good men who wanted to stay with the legions or the cavalry wings were allowed to. Nor were there few who wanted to leave, worn out by sickness and blaming the climate. But this stripped the legions and cavalry of their best men, and wrecked the pride of the camps—twenty thousand men drawn from the whole army, mixed together rather than picked.

99| Vitellius was in the middle of addressing the troops when the men shouted for the deaths of three chieftains of Gaul — Asiaticus, Flavus, Rufinus — for having taken Vindex's side. He made no move to silence them. Aware of his own weakness and cowardice, and knowing a donative was due but the money wasn't there, he gave the soldiers everything else instead. The freedmen of past emperors were ordered to contribute according to the number of their slaves, as a kind of tax. Vitellius himself, with his one obsession being how to waste money, built stables for his chariot drivers, filled the Circus with gladiator and wild-beast shows, and played the fool as if money were in endless supply.

100| Caecina and Valens even celebrated Vitellius's birthday with gladiator shows staged street by street across the whole city, at enormous and unprecedented expense. But what pleased the worst sort disgusted every decent man: he had built altars on the Campus Martius and offered funeral sacrifices to Nero. Victims were slaughtered and burned at public expense; the Augustales lit the fire—a priesthood which Caesar Tiberius consecrated to the Julian house, just as Romulus had done for King Tatius. Not yet four months since his victory, and Vitellius's freedman Asiaticus already ranked alongside Polyclitus, Patrobius, and the other old names of hatred. No one in that court competed in honesty or hard work; there was only one road to power—glutting Vitellius's insatiable appetites with extravagant banquets, spending, and debauchery. Vitellius himself, thinking it enough to enjoy the present without planning for later, is believed to have squandered nine hundred million sesterces in a very few months. Great and wretched city, having endured Otho and Vitellius in the same year, tossed between the likes of Vinius, Fabius, Icelus, and Asiaticus in a shifting, shameful lottery—until Mucianus and Marcellus succeeded them, bringing different men, though hardly different morals.

101| The first news to reach Vitellius was the defection of the Third Legion, in a letter from Aponius Saturninus, sent before Aponius himself also joined Vespasian's side. But Aponius, flustered by the sudden crisis, had not written the full story, and flattering friends softened it further in the telling: it was only one legion's mutiny, they said, while the other armies stayed loyal. Vitellius spoke to the soldiers in the same terms, attacking the recently discharged Praetorians as the source of false rumors, and insisting there was no danger of civil war—all while suppressing Vespasian's name and sending soldiers roaming the city to silence public talk. That, more than anything, only fed the rumor.

102| Even so, he summoned auxiliaries from Germany, Britain, and the Spanish provinces, sluggishly and trying to hide the urgency. The governors and provinces dragged their feet accordingly: Hordeonius Flaccus was anxious over his own war, with the Batavians already under suspicion; Vettius Bolanus never found Britain quiet enough to spare men; and both were of divided loyalty besides. Nothing came quickly from Spain either, since there was no consular governor there at the time; the legates of the three legions, equal in rank, would have competed to obey if Vitellius's fortunes had been rising, but with them falling, all held back equally. In Africa, the legion and cohorts raised by Clodius Macer, then disbanded by Galba, took up service again on Vitellius's order, and the rest of the young men there enlisted eagerly too—because Vitellius's term as proconsul there had been clean and popular, while Vespasian's had been notorious and hated. The allies accordingly guessed how each man's rule would go; events proved the opposite.

103| At first Valerius Festus, the governor, backed the province's enthusiasm loyally. Then he began to waver, openly favoring Vitellius in his letters and edicts while secretly courting Vespasian, ready to back whichever side prevailed. Some soldiers and centurions caught carrying Vespasian's letters and edicts through Raetia and Gaul were sent to Vitellius and executed; more escaped detection, hidden by loyal friends or their own cunning. So Vitellius's preparations were well known, while most of Vespasian's plans stayed hidden—at first from Vitellius's own laziness, then because garrisons holding the Pannonian Alps blocked the messengers. Even the sea favored those sailing east with the Etesian winds, and turned against those sailing the other way.

104| Finally, terrified by enemy incursions and grim news from every side, Vitellius ordered Caecina and Valens to make ready for war. Caecina was sent ahead; Valens, only just rising from a severe illness, was held back by weakness. The army of Germany that now set out from the city looked nothing like the one that had marched before: no vigor in their bodies, no fire in their spirits; a slow, thin column, slack weapons, sluggish horses—soldiers who couldn't bear sun, dust, or bad weather, and the duller they were at enduring hardship, the readier they were for quarrels. On top of this came Caecina's old ambition and his new lethargy, the men grown soft with too much good fortune and given over to luxury—or perhaps it suited a man planning treachery to sap the army's fighting spirit deliberately. Most believed Caecina's mind had been unsettled by Flavius Sabinus's schemes, with Rubrius Gallus acting as go-between, and that the terms of his defection would be honored by Vespasian. At the same time he was reminded of his hatred and jealousy toward Fabius Valens, and urged to secure standing and strength with the new emperor, since he was falling behind in Vitellius's favor.

105| Caecina took his leave of Vitellius amid great ceremony, pushing part of the cavalry forward to grab Cremona first. Behind them marched detachments drawn from four legions—the First, Fourth, Fifteenth, Sixteenth—with the Fifth and Twenty-Second following; the column's rear was made up of the Twenty-First Rapax and the First Italica, together with contingents from the three legions in Britain and a body of picked auxiliaries. Once Caecina was on the road, Fabius Valens sent word to the troops he had formerly commanded, urging them to wait for him along the way—insisting this matched an understanding he'd reached with Caecina. But Caecina, being there in person and holding the stronger hand, bent that message into something else: a plan for the whole force to converge for the coming fight. Accordingly the legions were told to press on toward Cremona, with some diverted instead toward Hostilia; Caecina himself veered off to Ravenna, supposedly to speak to the fleet, and from there arranged a secret meeting at Patavium to set his betrayal in motion. For Lucilius Bassus, after commanding a cavalry wing, had been put by Vitellius in charge of both the Ravenna and Misenum fleets together, and, resentful at not being made praetorian prefect outright, was avenging his petty grievance with outrageous treachery. It cannot be known whether he drew Caecina in, or whether—since it so often happens that bad men are alike—the same rottenness drove them both to it.

106| The historians who wrote of this war while the Flavian house held power passed down a tale of concern for peace and love of the republic, motives corrupted into flattery. To me it seems that beyond his natural fickleness, and the loyalty he had already made cheap by betraying Galba, it was rivalry and jealousy—the fear of being outdone by others in Vitellius's favor—that finally destroyed Vitellius himself. Caecina, once he reached the legions, worked by various tricks to undermine the men's and centurions' stubborn loyalty to Vitellius. Bassus, attempting the same thing, had less trouble, since the fleet's loyalty was already shaky, given how recently it had served for Otho.

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