Histories — Book 3

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

1| The Flavian commanders were weighing their plans of war with better luck and better faith. They had gathered at Poetovio, the winter camp of the Thirteenth Legion. There they debated whether to block the Pannonian Alps until their full strength assembled behind them, or to advance and fight for Italy without delay. Those who wanted to wait for reinforcements and stretch the war out pointed to the German legions' strength and name — and to this too: Vitellius now had the pick of Britain's army standing behind him. Their own beaten legions were fewer, and however boldly men talk, defeat drains the heart out of them. But meanwhile, if they held the Alps, Mucianus would arrive with the forces of the East; Vespasian still had the sea, the fleet, and the loyalty of the provinces, from which he could raise what amounted to a second war. So a healthy delay would bring fresh strength, and nothing they already had would be lost.

2| Against this, Antonius Primus — the fiercest advocate for war — argued that speed would help them and ruin Vitellius. The victors had gained more laziness than confidence: they had not been kept under arms and in camp, but had grown soft in every town of Italy, feared only by their hosts, and the more savagely they had once behaved, the more greedily they now gulped down unfamiliar pleasures. The circus, the theaters, the charms of the city had melted them, or sickness had worn them down. But given time they too would recover their strength through the discipline of war. Germany was not far off, the source of their power; Britain was only separated by a strait; Gaul and Spain lay close by on both sides, supplying men, horses, and money, not to mention Italy itself and the wealth of Rome. And if the enemy chose to take the offensive, there were two fleets and an undefended Illyrian sea. What good then would mountain barriers do? What good would come of dragging the war into another summer? Where would the money and supplies come from meanwhile? Better instead to use exactly what they had: the Pannonian legions, tricked rather than beaten, were eager to rise again for revenge, and the army of Moesia brought fresh strength untouched by defeat. If you counted soldiers rather than legions, there was more real force here and none of the corruption; their very shame had worked in favor of discipline. As for the cavalry, they had not even been beaten then — only the Vitellian line had been scattered while fortune ran against it. 'Then, two squadrons of Pannonian and Moesian horse broke the enemy; now sixteen combined squadrons will crash into them, overwhelm them with noise and dust, and drown riders and horses alike who have forgotten what battle is. Unless someone stops me, I will be both the one who urges this plan and the one who carries it out. You, whose fortunes are still untested, hold the legions back — light cohorts will be enough for me. Soon you will hear that Italy stands open and that Vitellius's cause is shattered. It will be a pleasure to follow and to tread in the footsteps of the winning side.'

3| He poured all this out with blazing eyes and a harsh voice, pitched to carry — for centurions and some of the soldiers had pushed into the council — and it moved even the cautious and careful, while the rank and file and the rest praised him alone as their man and leader, scorning the sluggishness of everyone else. He had built this reputation for himself already at an earlier assembly, where, after Vespasian's letters were read out, he had not, like most, spoken vaguely so as to twist his words later whichever way suited him — he had come out openly for the cause, and so his soldiers found him a weightier partner, whether in blame or in glory.

4| Next in authority was the procurator Cornelius Fuscus. He too had been in the habit of attacking Vitellius harshly, and had left himself no hope if things went badly. Tampius Flavianus, cautious by nature and by age, stirred the soldiers' suspicions, as though he still remembered his family ties to Vitellius; and because he had fled when the legions first stirred and then come back on his own, people believed he had been looking for a chance to betray them. In fact Flavianus, having left Pannonia and entered Italy to escape the danger, had been driven by a hunger for revolution to resume the title of governor and involve himself in the civil war — urged on by Cornelius Fuscus, not because the cause needed Flavianus's energy, but so that a consular name might lend a respectable face to a party just then rising.

5| To make the crossing into Italy safe and useful, word was sent to Aponius Saturninus to hurry there with the Moesian army. And so the unarmed provinces would not be exposed to the barbarian tribes, the chiefs of the Sarmatian Iazyges, who held power among their people, were taken on as allies. They also offered their commons and their cavalry — the only arm in which they were strong — but this was declined, so that they would not exploit the civil discord to stir up foreign trouble, or, bidding higher on the other side, cast off all sense of right and wrong. King Sido and King Italicus of the Suebi were drawn into the party; their people had long been loyal to Rome, and their people had long been loyal to Rome, and their race was more patient in keeping faith [text corrupt]. Auxiliaries were posted on the flank, since Raetia was hostile, its procurator Porcius Septiminus being unshakably loyal to Vitellius. Sextilius Felix was therefore sent with the Auriana wing, eight cohorts, and the young men of Noricum to seize the bank of the river Inn, which runs between Raetia and Noricum. Neither side risked battle there, and the fortunes of the war were decided elsewhere.

6| As Antonius rushed detachments from the cohorts and part of the cavalry to invade Italy, he was joined by Arrius Varus, a vigorous soldier whose reputation had been built both by Corbulo's command and by his own success in Armenia. The same man was said to have privately slandered Corbulo's courage to Nero; the disgraceful favor this won him won him the rank of chief centurion, welcome at the time but ill-gotten, and it later turned to his ruin. But Primus and Varus, having seized Aquileia, were received with joy at every town along the way, at Opitergium and Altinum. A garrison was left at Altinum against any move by the fleet at Ravenna, since its defection had not yet been heard of. From there they brought Patavium and Ateste over to their side. There they learned that three Vitellian cohorts and the Sebosian cavalry wing had settled at Forum Alieni, where a bridge had been thrown across the river. The chance to strike while they were off guard seemed too good to miss — word of their carelessness had reached them too. At first light they overwhelmed most of them still unarmed. Orders had been given to kill only a few and terrify the rest into changing sides. Some surrendered at once; more, breaking down the bridge, cut off their own escape from the advancing enemy. The opening moves of the war went to the Flavians.

7| News of the victory spread, and the Seventh Galbian and Thirteenth Gemina legions, under their commander Vedius Aquila, marched eagerly into Patavium. There a few days were spent resting, and Minicius Justus, camp prefect of the Seventh Legion, was pulled out of reach of his soldiers' anger — for he had commanded them with a strictness better suited to peacetime than civil war — and sent off to Vespasian. A move long wished for was made to seem grander than it was, through the way it was presented: Antonius ordered the images of Galba, thrown down amid the turmoil of the times, restored and honored again in every town, judging it fitting for the cause — it would suggest that Galba's rule had been popular and that the party was reviving.

8| Next they debated where to make their base for the war. Verona seemed the better choice, with open plains around it suited to cavalry fighting, their strongest arm; and it seemed likely to strip Vitellius of a colony rich in resources, both practically and for its propaganda value. Vicenza fell into their hands simply by passing through it — a small thing in itself, since the town had modest strength, but it carried weight when people considered that Caecina had been born there, and that the enemy general's own homeland had been snatched from him. Verona was worth more still: its people helped the cause with their example and their wealth, and the army posted there blocked off Raetia and the Julian Alps, sealing that route against the German armies. Vespasian either did not know of these moves or had forbidden them: his orders were that the war should halt at Aquileia and wait for Mucianus, and he backed the order with sound reasoning — since Egypt, which controlled the grain supply, and the revenues of the wealthiest provinces were in his hands, Vitellius's army could be starved into surrender for lack of pay and food. Mucianus urged the same in letter after letter, giving as his excuse a bloodless, mourning-free victory and other fine phrases of that kind — but in truth he was greedy for glory and meant to keep all credit for the war to himself. In any case, given the vast distances involved, his advice always arrived after events had already overtaken it.

9| So Antonius made a sudden strike and broke through the enemy's outposts; both sides tested each other in a light skirmish and drew apart evenly matched. Soon after, Caecina fortified a camp between Hostilia, a village of Verona's territory, and the marshes of the river Tartarus, well protected by position, with the river at his back and the marsh guarding his flanks. Had he been loyal, the two legions there — before the Moesian army had joined the rest — could either have been crushed by the full Vitellian force, or, driven back, might have abandoned Italy in disgraceful flight. But Caecina, through a series of delays, handed the enemy their first opening in the war, wasting time berating by letter men he could easily have driven off by arms, until through go-betweens he sealed the terms of his own treachery. Meanwhile Aponius Saturninus reached camp with the Seventh Claudian legion; its tribune, Vipstanus Messala, came from a distinguished line, was himself a man of real standing, and alone brought genuine skill to this war. Against this force — still no match for the Vitellians, since they themselves as yet had only three legions — Caecina sent letters accusing them of recklessness in taking up arms already beaten. At the same time he praised the courage of the German army to the skies, mentioned Vitellius only modestly and in passing, and said nothing insulting about Vespasian — nothing, in short, that might either corrupt or frighten the enemy. The Flavian commanders, for their part, dropped any defense of their earlier bad luck, spoke grandly for Vespasian, confidently for the cause, securely of their army, and attacked Vitellius as declared enemies, giving the tribunes and centurions hope of keeping whatever privileges Vitellius had granted them; and they urged Caecina himself, not too subtly, toward defection. Reading his letters out before the assembly only strengthened their confidence, since Caecina had written so submissively, as if afraid of offending Vespasian, while their own commanders had written of Vitellius with open contempt, as though mocking him.

10| When two legions arrived — the Third, led by Dillius Aponianus, and the Eighth, led by Numisius Lupus — the commanders decided to show off their strength and ring Verona with a military rampart. As it happened, the Galbian legion had been assigned the work on the side of the wall facing the enemy, and when allied cavalry were spotted in the distance, they were mistaken for the enemy, sparking needless panic. Men grabbed their weapons, fearing betrayal. Their anger fell on Tampius Flavianus — with no proof of any crime, but he had long been hated, and now some sudden storm demanded his destruction. They shouted that he was Vitellius's relative, Otho's betrayer, the man who had stolen their bonus. There was no room for defense, though he stretched out his hands as a suppliant, again and again throwing himself on the ground, his clothes torn, his chest and face heaving with sobs. That very display only inflamed the hostile crowd further — as if such excessive fear proved his guilt. Aponius was shouted down when he tried to speak; the men rejected everyone else with roars and yells. Only to Antonius would the soldiers listen, for he had the gift of eloquence, the skill of soothing a mob, and real authority. When the mutiny began to boil over and turned from curses and insults to weapons and violence, he ordered chains put on Flavianus. The soldiers saw through the trick, scattered the men guarding the platform, and prepared a final assault. Antonius bared his own chest against their drawn swords, swearing he would die either by the soldiers' hands or his own, and calling by name on every man he recognized who bore some mark of military honor, urging him to help. Then he turned to the standards and the gods of war, praying that they would hurl that same madness, that same discord, onto the enemy's armies instead — until the mutiny finally wore itself out, and as the day ended each man slipped back to his own tent. That same night Flavianus set out and, meeting a letter from Vespasian on the road, was saved from danger.

11| The legions, as if infected by the same disease, turned on Aponius Saturninus, commander of the army of Moesia, even more savagely than before — not because they were worn out by labor and fieldwork this time, but because they flared up in the middle of the day, once letters supposedly written by Saturninus to Vitellius had been made public. Where once there had been a contest in courage and discipline, now it was a contest in insolence and defiance, each side determined to demand Aponius's execution no less violently than Flavianus's. The Moesian legions claimed they had helped avenge the Pannonians before, and the Pannonians, as if excused by another unit's mutiny, were glad to repeat the offense. They marched on the gardens where Saturninus was staying. It was not so much Primus, Aponianus, and Messala — though they tried every means — who saved Saturninus, as the darkness of the hiding place where he was concealed: the furnace room of some baths that happened to be empty. Soon after, dismissing his lictors, he withdrew to Patavium. With the departure of the two consulars, all power over both armies fell to Antonius alone, as his colleagues stepped back and the soldiers' loyalty turned toward him. Some believed both mutinies had been engineered by Antonius's own treachery, so that he alone would reap the rewards of the war.

12| Nor were minds at rest on Vitellius's side either: a more ruinous discord unsettled them — not the crowd's suspicions this time, but the treachery of their own commanders. Lucilius Bassus, prefect of the fleet at Ravenna, had won over the wavering loyalty of the sailors — a large portion of them Dalmatians and Pannonians, from provinces held by Vespasian — and brought them over to his side. He chose a night for the betrayal, so that the defectors could gather alone at headquarters while everyone else remained unaware. Bassus himself, from shame or fear of how it might turn out, waited it out at home. The ship captains tore down Vitellius's images amid great uproar; a few who resisted were cut down, and the rest of the crowd, eager for revolution, swung toward Vespasian. Then Lucilius came forward and openly declared himself the instigator. The fleet chose Cornelius Fuscus as their prefect, and he hurried to join them. Bassus, held under a mark of respect, was carried by Liburnian galleys to Atria, where he was put in chains by Vibennius Rufinus, commander of a cavalry squadron stationed there — but the chains were struck off at once when Hormus, a freedman of Caesar's, intervened. Hormus too was counted among the leaders.

13| Meanwhile Caecina, once the fleet's defection became known, singled out the senior centurions and a handful of soldiers — the rest had been scattered on various duties — and, wanting the privacy of the camp, summoned them to headquarters. There he praised Vespasian's courage and the strength of his party: the fleet had gone over, supplies were tight, Gaul and Spain were hostile, nothing in Rome could be trusted — and he painted everything about Vitellius in the worst light. Then, with his co-conspirators taking the lead, he swore in the rest, who were stunned by the sudden turn, to Vespasian's name. At the same time Vitellius's images were torn down and messengers sent to inform Antonius. But once word of the betrayal spread through the whole camp, soldiers came running back to headquarters and saw Vespasian's name posted and Vitellius's statues thrown down. At first there was a vast silence; then everything broke out at once. Had it come to this — that the glory of the army of Germany should surrender its arms and hand over its men bound, without a fight, without a wound? What legions, after all, stood against them on the other side? Beaten ones — and even then the one true strength of Otho's army, the First and Fourteenth legions, was absent, though they themselves had routed and crushed those very legions on that same battlefield. Were so many thousands of armed men to be handed over as a gift to the exile Antonius, like a herd sold at auction? Did they really think eight legions were nothing more than an appendage to one fleet? This was what Bassus wanted, what Caecina wanted — after stripping the emperor of his homes, his gardens, his wealth, now to steal his soldiers too. Unharmed and unbloodied, cheap even in Flavian eyes, what would they say when asked to account for either victory or defeat?

14| These things men shouted, singly and all together, each driven by his own grievance, until the outcry began with the Fifth legion; Vitellius's images were put back up and chains thrown on Caecina. They chose as their leaders Fabius Fabullus, commander of the Fifth legion, and Cassius Longus, camp prefect. Soldiers from three Liburnian galleys who happened to cross their path, innocent and unaware of what was happening, were slaughtered. Then, abandoning the camp and destroying the bridge, they marched back to Hostilia and from there to Cremona, to join the First Italic and Twenty-First Rapax legions, which Caecina had already sent ahead with part of the cavalry to hold Cremona.

15| When Antonius learned of this, he decided to attack the enemy armies while their minds were divided and their forces scattered, before their commanders could recover authority, their soldiers obedience, or the reunited legions their confidence. He guessed that Fabius Valens, who had already left Rome, would hurry his march once he learned of Caecina's treachery — and Fabius was loyal to Vitellius and no stranger to warfare. At the same time a huge force of Germans was feared, coming through Raetia. Vitellius had also called up reinforcements from Britain, Gaul, and Spain — an immense flood of war, unless Antonius, fearing exactly that, could force a battle quickly and seize victory first. So with his whole army he marched two days from Verona and reached Bedriacum. The next day he kept the legions back to fortify the camp, and sent the auxiliary cohorts into the countryside around Cremona, ostensibly to gather supplies, but really to blood the troops on plunder from Roman citizens; he himself advanced with four thousand cavalry to a point eight miles from Bedriacum, so they could raid more freely. His scouts, as usual, ranged farther out.

16| It was about the fifth hour of the day when a fast-riding cavalryman reported that the enemy was approaching, a few men riding ahead, and that movement and noise could be heard far off. While Antonius was still weighing what to do, Arrius Varus, eager to get something done, charged out with his keenest horsemen and drove the Vitellians back with modest losses. But once their larger numbers rallied, fortune reversed, and the men who had pursued hardest were now the last in the flight. Antonius had not ordered the charge, but he judged that what happened was bound to happen anyway. He urged his men to take up the fight boldly, spread his cavalry squadrons out to either side, and left a clear path down the middle to receive Varus and his horsemen. He ordered the legions to arm, and sent word through the fields that every man, wherever nearest, should abandon his plunder and rush to the fight. Meanwhile a panicked Varus got tangled up with his own scattered men and spread the fear further. The routed troops, mixed in with the wounded, clashed with their own unhurt comrades, hampered by their own fear and the narrow roads.

17| In all that confusion, Antonius left nothing undone that a steady commander or a brave soldier should do. He ran to the frightened, held back the retreating, and wherever the strain was greatest, wherever there was any hope, he stood out — by judgment, by hand, by voice — visible to the enemy, conspicuous to his own men. He was carried away by the heat of it to the point of spearing a standard-bearer who was fleeing, then snatching up the standard himself and turning it against the enemy. Shamed by this, no more than a hundred cavalrymen stood their ground — but the terrain helped: the road narrowed there, and a bridge over a stream running between the banks had been broken, its uncertain channel and steep banks blocking the fugitives' escape. That necessity, or perhaps chance, restored the side that had already begun to slip. Rallying together in close ranks, they met the Vitellians, who had scattered themselves recklessly in pursuit, and threw them into confusion. Antonius pressed the shaken enemy, cutting down whoever stood in his way, while the rest, each according to his taste, stripped bodies, took prisoners, and seized weapons and horses. And the men who only moments before had been scattered in flight across the fields, drawn back by the cheer of victory, rejoined the fight.

18| About four miles from Cremona the standards of the Rapax and Italic legions gleamed into view, having advanced that far on the strength of an early, cheering success by their own cavalry. But once fortune turned against them, they could not loosen their ranks, could not take in the routed men, could not march out to meet and attack the enemy — who by now were exhausted from covering that whole distance at a run and fighting the whole way. As it happened, the beaten men had not missed their commander's presence in success nearly as much as they now felt his absence in defeat. The victorious cavalry charged their wavering line, and the tribune Vipstanus Messala arrived with the Moesian auxiliaries, matched by many legionaries who, though hastily gathered, kept pace with them; so infantry and cavalry mixed together broke the legions' formation. And the nearness of Cremona's walls gave them less courage to resist the closer it offered hope of escape. Antonius pressed no further, mindful of the exhaustion and wounds that had battered his cavalry and their horses through so uncertain a battle, however fortunate its end.

19| As evening cast its shadow, the full strength of the Flavian army arrived. When they saw the heaps of dead and the fresh traces of slaughter, they demanded, as if the war were already won, to press on to Cremona and either accept the surrender of the beaten enemy or storm the town. That was the talk in the open, and it sounded fine. But privately each man was thinking something else: that a town on level ground could be taken by a single rush. Breaking in under cover of darkness gave them the same boldness and more license to plunder. If they waited for daylight, they'd get peace instead, and pleas for mercy — clemency and glory for their toil and wounds, empty rewards, while the real wealth of Cremona would end up in the pockets of the prefects and commanders. The plunder of a stormed city belongs to the soldiers; of a surrendered one, to the generals. So they scorned their centurions and tribunes, and to keep any other voice from being heard they clashed their weapons, ready to break ranks if not led forward.

20| Then Antonius pushed in among the companies, and where his presence and authority won silence, he insisted he wasn't trying to rob such deserving men of glory or reward — only that duties were divided between army and commanders. It suited soldiers to crave battle; commanders served best by foresight, deliberation, and caution more often than recklessness. Just as he had done his share with arms and hands toward the victory, so he would now contribute by judgment and planning — the proper skills of a general. The dangers ahead weren't in doubt: night, an unfamiliar city's layout, the enemy inside, everything set up for ambush. Even if the gates stood open, they should not enter without reconnaissance, without daylight. Or did they mean to start an assault with no way to see anything — what ground was favorable, how high the walls were, whether the city should be attacked with artillery and missiles or with siege-works and mantlets? Then, turning to individual men, he kept asking whether they'd brought axes and pickaxes and the other gear needed to storm a city. When they said no, he said: 'Can any hands break through and undermine walls with swords and javelins? If we have to build a ramp, or shelter under sheds and wicker screens, are we going to stand there uselessly, like some clueless mob, gawking at the height of the towers and someone else's fortifications? Wouldn't it be better to wait out one night, bring up the artillery and siege-engines, and carry force and victory in with us?' At the same time he sent the camp-servants and grooms, along with the freshest of the cavalry, to Bedriacum to bring up supplies and everything else needed.

21| The soldiers took this badly, and it nearly came to mutiny, when cavalry who had ridden ahead right up to the walls seized some stray Cremonese, and from their information it was learned that all six Vitellian legions and the entire army stationed at Hostilia had covered thirty miles that very day, and, learning of their side's defeat, were arming for battle and would soon arrive. This alarm broke through the deadlock and opened the men's minds to their commander's plans. He ordered the Thirteenth Legion to take position on the raised roadbed of the Via Postumia itself; next to it on the left the Seventh Galbiana stood in open field, then the Seventh Claudia, protected by a rough ditch (that was the lay of the land); on the right the Eighth held an open stretch, and beyond it the Third, hidden among thick woods. Such was the arrangement of eagles and standards; but the soldiers themselves, however chance had scattered them, were jumbled together in the darkness. The praetorian banner stood nearest the men of the Third; the auxiliary cohorts held the wings, with cavalry ringing the flanks and rear. Sido and Italicus, Suebian chiefs, moved with their picked countrymen in the front line.

22| The Vitellian army, meanwhile, whose sensible plan would have been to rest at Cremona, restore their strength with food and sleep, and the next day crush an enemy worn down by cold and hunger, instead — lacking a real commander, with no coherent plan — collided with the Flavians, who were already deployed and ready, at around the third hour of the night. I would not dare to swear to the order of their marching column, thrown into disarray by rage and darkness, though some have recorded that the Fourth Macedonica held their right wing, the Fifth and Fifteenth together with detachments from the Ninth, Second, and Twentieth British legions held the center, and the Sixteenth, Twenty-second, and First made up the left. The men of the First Italica and the Rapax had mixed themselves in with every company; the cavalry and auxiliaries chose their own ground. The battle raged all night, shifting, uncertain, savage — deadly first to one side, then the other. Courage and strength counted for nothing, nor even eyesight to guide them. Both armies carried the same weapons, the watchword was learned by constant questioning back and forth, and standards got mixed together as each group dragged off whatever it had seized from the enemy this way or that. The Seventh Legion, newly raised by Galba, took the worst of it. Six centurions of the first rank were killed, some standards were snatched away; the eagle itself was saved by Atilius Verus, chief centurion, who inflicted heavy losses on the enemy and, dying in the end, kept it safe.

23| Antonius shored up his wavering line by calling in the praetorians. When they joined the fight they drove the enemy back — and were then driven back themselves. For the Vitellians had massed their artillery on the roadbed so their missiles could be fired across open, clear ground; at first the shots scattered, striking the trees without harm to the enemy. But the exceptional size of the Fifteenth Legion's ballista let it smash the enemy line with huge stones, and it would have caused wide slaughter had not two soldiers dared a splendid feat: grabbing shields from among the fallen, they went unrecognized and cut the ropes and counterweights of the engines. They were killed on the spot, and so their names were lost with them; the deed itself is not in doubt. Fortune tipped toward neither side until, well into the night, the rising moon showed the battle lines — and deceived them too. It favored the Flavians more, coming up behind them: from that angle the shadows of their men and horses looked larger, and the enemy's weapons, aimed as if at real bodies, fell short. The Vitellians, lit up by the light in front of them, made easy targets, as if for men throwing from hiding.

24| So Antonius, wherever he could recognize his own men and be recognized by them, fired them up — some with shame and reproach, many with praise and encouragement, and every one of them with hope and promises. Why, he asked the Pannonian legions, had they taken up arms again, if not for this — these were the very fields where they might erase the stain of their earlier disgrace and reclaim their glory. Then, turning to the Moesian legions, he called out the men who had started this war, its ringleaders: it was pointless to have provoked the Vitellians with threats and words if they couldn't now stand up to their fists and their stares. He tailored his words to each group as he reached them; but he said the most to the men of the Third, reminding them of old victories and new — how they'd beaten the Parthians under Mark Antony, the Armenians under Corbulo, and just recently the Sarmatians. Then, turning sharply to the praetorians: 'Unless you win,' he said, 'you civilians — what other emperor, what other camp will take you in? Your standards and your arms are over there, and death awaits the defeated, since you've already used up your disgrace.' From every side came a shout, and the men of the Third — as is the custom in Syria — saluted the rising sun.

25| A rumor then spread, whether by chance or planted by the commander's design, that Mucianus had arrived and that the armies had exchanged greetings. The Flavians advanced as if reinforced by fresh troops, just as the Vitellian line was thinning out, since with no one directing them each man was being pulled together or scattered by his own drive or his own fear. Once Antonius sensed they were wavering, he pressed them with a dense formation. Their ranks loosened and broke apart, and could not be reformed, hampered as they were by their own wagons and artillery. They scattered along the roadside in the rush of the pursuing victors. The slaughter gained further notoriety from a son's killing of his father. For the facts and names, I rely on the authority of Vipstanus Messala. Julius Mansuetus, a Spaniard, had enrolled in the Rapax legion, leaving behind a young son at home. That son, now grown, had been conscripted into the Seventh, and happened to come across his father, struck down and wounded; while going through the half-dead man's belongings he recognized him — and was recognized in turn. Embracing the lifeless body, he cried out, begging his father's spirit for peace, and pleading not to be shunned as a murderer: this was a crime shared by everyone, and what portion of a civil war's guilt could fall on one soldier? At the same time he lifted the body, opened the earth, and performed the last duties owed to a parent. Those nearby noticed, then more men; and from that the whole army was struck with wonder, grief, and curses on this most vicious of wars. And yet it made them no gentler about butchering and stripping their own relatives, kin, and brothers: they talked about it as a crime, and kept doing it.

26| When they reached Cremona, a huge new obstacle met them. During the war against Otho the German troops had pitched their camp against Cremona's walls and thrown a rampart around the camp, and had since strengthened those fortifications further. At the sight of them the victors halted, their commanders unsure what to order. Beginning an assault with an army worn out from a full day and night of fighting looked risky, with no support nearby; but if they fell back to Bedriacum, the march was unbearably long, and the victory would be thrown away for nothing. Fortifying a camp of their own was frightening too, with the enemy so close — they might be caught scattered and busy building when a sudden sally hit them. But above everything else, what alarmed the leaders was their own soldiers, less patient with delay than with danger: for them, safety held no appeal, and hope only came from recklessness; every killing, every wound, every drop of blood was offset in their minds by greed for plunder.

27| Antonius came down on this side and ordered the rampart ringed for assault. At first they exchanged arrows and stones at a distance, with heavier losses on the Flavian side, since missiles were being hurled down on them from above; then he assigned the rampart and gates to specific legions, so that the divided task would separate the brave from the cowardly, and the rivalry itself would spur them on to win honor. The men of the Third and Seventh took the stretch nearest the Bedriacum road, the Eighth and Seventh Claudia the right side of the rampart, and the Thirteenth was carried by its own drive toward the Brixian gate. There was a brief pause while men gathered mattocks and axes from the nearby fields, and others hooks and ladders; then, raising their shields above their heads in a close tortoise-formation, they advanced. Roman tactics faced Roman tactics on both sides: the Vitellians rolled down heavy stones, probing the broken and wavering tortoise-shell with lances and pikes until the wall of shields gave way and they laid men out, dead or mangled, with heavy losses. Hesitation would have taken hold, had the commanders not pointed out Cremona to the exhausted troops to the exhausted troops, who were refusing further exhortation as useless.

28| Whether this was Hormus's own cleverness, as Messalla reports, or whether Pliny the Elder is the better source in blaming Antonius, I can't easily say — except that neither Antonius nor Hormus ever did anything, in his life or reputation, out of keeping with this, the worst outrage of the war. Blood and wounds no longer slowed the men from undermining the rampart and battering the gates; propped on comrades' shoulders, climbing over a shield-wall built on another shield-wall, they grabbed at the enemy's weapons and arms. The unhurt tumbled down with the wounded, the half-dead with the dying, men perishing in every shape and every form death takes.

29| The fiercest fighting was between the Third and Seventh legions, and Antonius the commander had thrown himself into that spot with picked auxiliaries. When the Vitellians could no longer hold against their stubbornness, and the missiles hurled down slid off the shield-wall, the defenders finally shoved a siege-engine itself down onto the men coming up. For the moment it scattered and crushed whoever it landed on, but as it fell it took the battlements down with it, and the rampart's crest along with them. In that same instant, next to it, another tower buckled and came apart under a battering of stones; the Seventh's men worked that opening with crowbars, while the Third's men hacked the gate apart with axes and swords. All sources agree that Gaius Volusius, a soldier of the Third legion, was first inside. He mounted the rampart, threw down those still resisting, and, conspicuous by gesture and voice, shouted that the camp was taken; the rest broke through while the now-panicked Vitellians flung themselves off the wall. The whole open ground between camp and city walls filled with slaughter.

30| And now a new shape of hardship: the city's high walls, its stone towers, the iron-barred gates, soldiers hurling weapons, and a Cremonese population thick and firmly bound to the Vitellian cause — a great part of Italy, too, gathered there for the fair regularly held at that season, which meant a large crowd to help the defenders and a rich haul to spur on the attackers. Antonius ordered fire seized and carried into the finest buildings outside the city, hoping the loss of their property would drag the people of Cremona into switching sides. He packed the buildings near the walls, and those tall enough to overtop the ramparts, with his bravest soldiers; from these the defenders were driven off with beams, roof-tiles, and torches.

31| Now the legions were massing into a shield-wall, and men kept hurling spears and stones, when little by little the spirit of the Vitellians began to fail. The higher a man's rank, the readier he was to yield to fortune — for fear that if Cremona too were destroyed there would be no pardon left, and that all the victor's fury, instead of falling on the helpless rank and file, would turn back on the tribunes and centurions, where killing them paid a price. The common soldier, careless of the future and safer in his obscurity, held on: they wandered the streets or hid in houses, not even begging for peace once they had laid down the war. The camp's leading men tore down Vitellius's name and images; they struck the chains off Caecina — for he was still a prisoner even then — and begged him to stand up and plead their cause. He refused, swelling with contempt, but they wore him down with tears — the last indignity, that so many brave men should invoke a traitor's help. Then they held out olive branches and priestly fillets over the walls. When Antonius had ordered a halt to the missiles, they brought out the standards and eagles; a sad column of unarmed men followed, eyes cast to the ground. The victors had ringed them in and at first hurled insults, aimed blows; but soon, seeing the beaten men offer their faces to abuse and endure everything with all their fierceness laid down, the memory returned that these were the men who had shown restraint after their recent victory at Bedriacum. But when Caecina came forward, conspicuous in his consul's purple and attended by lictors, the crowd parting for him, the victors blazed up again: they hurled at him arrogance, cruelty — crimes so hateful — and treachery too. Antonius stood in the way, gave him an escort, and sent him off to Vespasian.

32| Meanwhile the common people of Cremona were caught in the middle among the armed troops; they came close to slaughter before the soldiers were softened by their commanders' pleading. Antonius called the men to assembly and addressed them — magnificent toward the victors, merciful toward the vanquished, on the subject of Cremona, saying nothing either way. But the army, driven by its ingrained lust for plunder as much as by old hatred, threw itself into destroying Cremona. The town was believed to have helped the Vitellian side back in the war against Otho too; and later, when men of the Thirteenth legion had been left behind to build an amphitheater, the town's people, with the insolence typical of city crowds, had mocked them with taunting jibes. What deepened the hatred further was that Caecina had staged a gladiator show there, that the town had twice now been the seat of war, that it had supplied the Vitellian troops with food in the field, and that some women, caught up in partisan zeal, had gone out to the battle and been killed there. The season of the fair, too, filled a colony already wealthy with an even greater show of riches. The other commanders stayed in the shadows; fortune and reputation had set Antonius alone in full view of everyone. Off he went to the baths, to scrub away the blood, and there a remark of his was overheard — when he complained the water was lukewarm, he said it would soon be hot enough: a slave's crude joke that turned all the town's hatred onto him, as if he had given the signal to set Cremona on fire — which was already burning.

33| Forty thousand armed men burst in, and an even greater number of camp-servants and sutlers, more given over yet to lust and cruelty. Neither rank nor age offered protection against rape mixing with murder, murder with rape. Old men worn out with age, women past their prime, worthless as plunder, were dragged off for sport; but whenever a grown girl, or anyone striking in looks, fell into their hands, she was torn apart by the hands of the men grabbing for her, and this in the end drove the plunderers themselves to destroy one another. While each man hauled off money or the heavy gold offerings of the temples for himself, others, stronger, cut them down and took it. Some, scorning what lay in plain sight, whipped and tortured the owners to make them dig out hidden things, unearth what was buried; torches in hand, once they had carried off the plunder, they hurled them for sheer wantonness into empty houses and gutted temples. And since the army was a mixture of tongues and customs, made up of citizens, allies, and foreigners together, their desires ran in every direction, and each man had his own notion of what was permitted — nothing was forbidden. For four days Cremona sufficed them. Everything went down in the flames, temples and homes alike — except the shrine of Mefitis outside the walls, left standing, whether by the accident of its site or by the goddess's own protection.

34| Such was the end of Cremona, in the two hundred eighty-sixth year from its founding. Its founding fell in the year Tiberius Sempronius and Publius Cornelius held the consulship, just as Hannibal bore down on Italy — meant to stand guard against the Gauls settled beyond the Po, and against whatever else might sweep down out of the Alps. So through the number of its settlers, the advantage of its rivers, the richness of its soil, and its intermarriage and ties with neighboring peoples, it grew and flourished — untouched by foreign wars, unlucky in civil ones. Antonius, ashamed of the outrage as resentment against him spread, issued an order that no one should hold a Cremonese captive. And the plunder in captives was made worthless to the soldiers by the agreement of all Italy, which refused to buy such slaves; so they began to be killed instead. When this became known, relatives and kin secretly bought them back. Afterward the surviving population returned to Cremona; the forum and temples were rebuilt with the town's old civic splendor, and Vespasian encouraged the work.

35| But the soil, poisoned with the rot of a buried city, did not let the army linger long among the ruins. They advanced to the third milestone, gathered up the scattered and frightened Vitellians, each to his own standard, and dispersed the defeated legions through Illyricum, so they would not act as an uncertain force while the civil war still lingered. They then sent word and rumor of the news ahead into Britain and the Spanish provinces; into Gaul went the tribune Julius Calenus, into Germany the cohort commander Alpinius Montanus, sent for show since one was a Treveran and the other, Calenus, an Aeduan — both had been Vitellians. At the same time the Alpine passes were seized and garrisoned, and Germany was watched with suspicion, as if it were arming to help Vitellius.

36| Meanwhile Vitellius, having sent Caecina off and, a few days later, pushed Fabius Valens out to the war as well, was masking his anxieties with indulgence: he made no preparations for war, gave the soldiers no encouraging word or drill, showed himself nowhere before the public, but hid away in the shade of his garden pavilions — like some sluggish animal that, given food, simply lies there and grows torpid — and let past, present, and future slip alike into forgetfulness. It was there, idle and wasting away in the grove at Aricia, that the treachery of Lucilius Bassus and the defection of the fleet at Ravenna struck him down. Not long after, news came of Caecina too — a report mixing joy with grief, that he had both defected and been put in chains by his own army. In his dull mind, delight outweighed worry. He rode back into the city amid great celebration and, before a packed assembly, heaped praise on the soldiers' loyalty; he ordered Publilius Sabinus, the Praetorian prefect, put in chains for his friendship with Caecina, and put Alfenus Varus in his place.

37| Next he addressed the senate in a speech dressed up for grandeur, and was lifted up by the fathers' elaborately contrived flattery. The savage motion against Caecina was opened by Lucius Vitellius; then the rest, with rehearsed indignation, brought forward their own outrage as if pleading Vitellius's cause — that a consul had betrayed the state, a commander had betrayed his emperor, a man loaded with such wealth and so many honors had betrayed a friend. No one in any speech spoke ill of the Flavian commanders; blaming instead the armies' error and rashness, they circled warily around Vespasian's name, avoiding it. Nor was there missing a man who, with everyone laughing, wheedled for himself the single remaining day of the consulship — for one day was left in Caecina's term — both giver and taker mocked for it alike. On the day before the Kalends of November, Rosius Regulus entered office and resigned it the same day. Men learned in such things noted that never before had a substitute consul been appointed without the previous magistrate being formally stripped of office or a law passed — except that Caninius Rebilus had once been consul for a single day, under Caesar's dictatorship, when the rewards of civil war were being rushed out.

38| The death of Junius Blaesus, notorious in those days, deserves telling as we have it. Vitellius, sick with a serious illness, noticed from his bed a tower near the Servilian Gardens ablaze night after night with lamp after lamp. He asked why, and word came back: Caecina Tuscus was throwing a lavish dinner, and Junius Blaesus sat there as the guest of honor. The rest was exaggerated further — talk of extravagant spreads and loose, indulgent spirits. Some blamed Tuscus and the other guests, but blamed Blaesus more, on the grounds that he was living it up while the emperor lay ill. Once it was clear enough to those who watch closely for a prince's grudges that Vitellius was angered and that Blaesus could be brought down, Lucius Vitellius was given the job of informer. He hated Blaesus out of a corrupt rivalry, resenting that a man stained by every kind of disgrace should be outshone by another's clean reputation. He forced his way into the emperor's bedroom, threw himself at his brother's knees, clutching the emperor's son to his chest. Asked the reason for his distress, he said he had come in tears not out of fear for himself, but pleading for his brother and his brother's children. It was pointless to fear Vespasian, he said, held off as he was by so many Germanic legions, so many loyal and capable provinces, and by the sheer vastness of land and sea between. The enemy to watch was here, in the city, in Vitellius's own household — a man who boasted Junii and Antonii for ancestors, who paraded himself before the soldiers as affable and grand, a man of imperial blood. Everyone's attention had turned to him, while Vitellius, careless of both friends and enemies, coddled a rival who watched the emperor's labors from his own dinner table. For his ill-timed celebration he should be repaid with a night of grief and mourning — so that he would know and feel that Vitellius was alive, and ruling, and, whatever fate might bring, had a son.

39| Torn between the crime and his fear that delaying Blaesus's death would hasten his own ruin, while an open order would provoke bitter resentment, Vitellius decided to work by poison. He gave the crime credibility with a notably conspicuous show of joy, visiting Blaesus in person. Indeed his most brutal remark was overheard — I will give his exact words — boasting that he had feasted his eyes on the sight of his enemy dying. Blaesus, besides the distinction of his birth and the polish of his manners, held firm to his loyalty. Even while affairs still stood whole, when Caecina and the leading men of the party were already turning against Vitellius, he refused to court advancement. Upright, unruffled, seeking no sudden honor, so far from grasping at the throne that he barely escaped being thought worthy of it.

40| Meanwhile Fabius Valens, marching with a long, soft train of mistresses and eunuchs, more slowly than a man heading to war should, learned by fast couriers that Lucilius Bassus had betrayed the fleet at Ravenna. Had he pressed on with the march he had begun, he could have gotten ahead of the wavering Caecina, or reached the legions before the decisive battle. Some advised him to take his most trustworthy men by hidden paths, avoid Ravenna, and make for Hostilia or Cremona. Others favored summoning the praetorian cohorts from the city and breaking through with a strong force. He himself wasted the time for action in useless hesitation, weighing the options; then, rejecting both plans — the worst course when facing a dilemma — he tried to steer a middle path, and so acted neither boldly enough nor with any foresight.

41| He sent letters to Vitellius asking for help. Three cohorts arrived with a British cavalry wing — too large a number to slip past unnoticed, too small to break through. But even in so grave a crisis Valens did not escape scandal, being widely believed to be snatching illicit pleasures and defiling his hosts' homes with adultery and debauchery, backed by force, money, and the last desperate appetite of a collapsing fortune. Only with the arrival of the infantry and cavalry did the folly of the plan become clear, since he could not force his way through the enemy with so small a band, even a wholly loyal one, and these men had not brought full loyalty with them. Shame, though, and respect for their commander's presence held them back for a while — bonds that never last long among men who are frightened of danger but unconcerned about disgrace. Fearing this, he sent the cohorts ahead to Ariminum and ordered the cavalry wing to guard the rear. He himself, with a few companions whom the reversal of fortune had not changed, turned toward Umbria and then Etruria, where, learning the outcome of the battle at Cremona, he formed a plan that was not cowardly, and would have been formidable if it had succeeded: to seize ships, land somewhere in the province of Gallia Narbonensis, and stir up the Gauls, the armies, the peoples of Germany, and a fresh war.

42| After Valens had gone, Cornelius Fuscus brought up his army and sent Liburnian galleys along the nearby coastline, surrounding by land and sea the frightened men holding Ariminum. The plains of Umbria were occupied, as was the stretch where the region of Picenum is washed by the Adriatic, and all Italy was now divided between Vespasian and Vitellius along the ridge of the Apennines. Fabius Valens, driven from the Gulf of Pisa by sluggish seas or headwinds, was pushed on to the harbor of Monoecus. Not far off Marius Maturus, procurator of the Maritime Alps, was in command, still loyal to Vitellius, not yet having broken his oath even though everyone around him was hostile. He received Valens courteously, but frightened him out of rashly entering Gallia Narbonensis by warning him of the danger; at the same time the loyalty of the rest was shaken by fear.

43| For the procurator Valerius Paulinus — an able soldier and a friend of Vespasian's from before his rise — had already bound the surrounding communities to Vespasian's cause. He rallied everyone who, discharged by Vitellius, was eager to take up arms on their own account, and held the colony of Forum Julii, the key to the coast, under guard — his authority all the weightier because Forum Julii was his home town and he had standing with the praetorians, whose tribune he had once been; and the townspeople themselves, out of local pride and hopes of future advantage, worked hard to help the cause. As these preparations, solid in themselves and swollen further by rumor, spread among the wavering minds of the Vitellians, Fabius Valens withdrew to the ships with four scouts, three friends, and as many centurions. Maturus and the rest chose to stay behind and take the oath to Vespasian. But though the sea was safer for Valens than the shore or the towns, he remained unsure of his future course, clearer about what to avoid than about whom to trust, and a storm carried him to the Stoechades, the islands off Massilia. There Liburnian ships sent by Paulinus caught and overwhelmed him.

44| With Valens captured, everything turned toward the strength of the victor. It began in Spain, with the First Legion Adiutrix, which, still resentful of Vitellius on Otho's account, drew in the Tenth and Sixth as well. Gaul did not hesitate either. Britain, too, joined the rest — not without some unrest — carrying an ingrained goodwill toward Vespasian, since he had once commanded the Second Legion there under Claudius and won distinction in the war; among the troops, many centurions and soldiers whom Vitellius had promoted grew uneasy and switched allegiance to an emperor already proven in the field.

45| Amid this discord and the constant rumors of civil war, the Britons took heart, encouraged by Venutius, who — beyond his natural ferocity and hatred of the Roman name — was further inflamed by a personal grievance against Queen Cartimandua. Cartimandua ruled the Brigantes, powerful through noble birth, and had increased her power after capturing King Caratacus by treachery, an act that seemed to furnish Claudius Caesar's triumph. From this came wealth and the excess that comes with good fortune. She spurned Venutius, her husband, and took his armor-bearer Vellocatus as husband and consort in the kingdom. Her household was shaken at once by the scandal: the people's loyalty stood with the husband, the queen's passion and cruelty with the adulterer. So Venutius called in outside forces, and, aided by a revolt of the Brigantes themselves, brought Cartimandua to the brink of ruin. She then asked Rome for protection, and our cohorts and cavalry, through a series of engagements, managed to save the queen from danger, though at a cost: the kingdom was left to Venutius, the war to us.

46| In those same days Germany was thrown into turmoil, and Rome's position there was nearly wrecked by the incompetence of its commanders, mutiny among the legions, outside force, and the treachery of allies. That war, with its causes and outcomes — for it ran on far longer — we shall recount later. The Dacians too, a people never to be trusted, stirred, emboldened now that the army had been withdrawn from Moesia. At first they only watched quietly; but once they heard that Italy was ablaze with war and that everything everywhere had turned hostile, they overran the winter camps of the cohorts and cavalry wings and took control of both banks of the Danube. They were already preparing to destroy the legionary camps when Mucianus threw the Sixth Legion in their path, knowing of the victory at Cremona and anxious that a double outside threat might crush Rome if the Dacians and Germans broke in from opposite directions at once. As so often before, the fortune of the Roman people came to the rescue, bringing Mucianus and the strength of the East to the spot just when needed, and which had meanwhile brought matters at Cremona to a close. Fonteius Agrippa, who had governed Asia as proconsul for a year, was put in charge of Moesia, with reinforcements added from the Vitellian army — for scattering that army through the provinces and tying it down in a foreign war was part of the policy for securing peace.

47| The other nations were not quiet either. Sudden fighting broke out around Pontus, stirred up by a barbarian ex-slave, once commander of the royal fleet. This was Anicetus, a freedman of Polemon — once powerful, and unable to accept the change when the kingdom was turned into a province. So, invoking the name of Vitellius, he rallied the tribes living along Pontus, corrupting the most destitute of them with hopes of plunder, and — leading a force not to be dismissed — burst suddenly into Trapezus, a city of old renown founded by Greeks at the far edge of the Pontic coast. There he cut down a cohort, once a royal auxiliary unit; later granted Roman citizenship, they had kept Roman standards and arms but the Greeks' laziness and indiscipline. He also set fire to the fleet, ranging freely over an empty sea, since Mucianus had pulled the pick of the Liburnian galleys and every soldier off to Byzantium. Even the barbarians roamed about contemptuously, in ships they had knocked together on the spot. They call them camarae — narrow-sided, broad-bellied hulls, joined without bronze or iron fastenings; and when the sea swells, as the waves rise they build up the ships' sides with planking until they close them over like a roof. So they roll among the waves, with a prow at each end and oars that can be shifted from side to side, so that landing from either direction is equally safe.

48| This news caught Vespasian's attention, and he chose detachments from the legions along with a commander, Virdius Geminus, a man of proven soldiering. He attacked the enemy, disordered and scattered in their greed for plunder, and drove them onto their ships; then, having Liburnian galleys built in haste, he caught up with Anicetus at the mouth of the river Chobus, where he had taken shelter under the protection of the king of the Sedochezi, whom he had bribed with money and gifts into alliance. At first the king shielded his suppliant with threats and arms; but once he was shown the reward for betrayal, or war instead, he struck a bargain — barbarian loyalty being as fickle as it is — and handed over the deserters for Anicetus's death, putting an end to the slave war.

49| Vespasian, delighted by this victory, with everything running beyond his hopes, received news of the battle at Cremona while in Egypt. He pushed on to Alexandria all the faster, meaning to squeeze Vitellius's broken armies and the city — which had no resources of its own — with famine. He was also preparing to invade Africa, which lay on the same side, by land and sea, so that by cutting off the grain supply he would bring hunger and discord down on the enemy.

50| While the empire's fortune shifted amid this upheaval of the whole world, Antonius Primus, after Cremona, behaved with nothing like the same restraint, reckoning the war as good as won and the rest easy — or perhaps his good luck simply exposed the greed, arrogance, and other hidden vices in a nature like his. He strutted through conquered Italy as if it were his own; he courted his legions as his own; in everything he said and did he was building himself a road to power. And to steep his soldiers in license, he offered the legions the vacant centurions' posts left by the dead. By that vote the most turbulent men were chosen; the soldiers were no longer under their commanders' control — the commanders were dragged along by military violence. What began as mutiny and the corruption of discipline he soon turned to plunder, fearing nothing from the approaching Mucianus — which was more dangerous than despising Vespasian outright.

51| With winter close and the plains along the Po waterlogged, the army moved light. The standards and eagles of the victorious legions, the wounded and the older soldiers, and indeed most of those still fit, were left behind at Verona: the cohorts and cavalry wings and picked men from the legions seemed enough, now that the war was practically finished. The Eleventh Legion had joined them — hesitant at first, but anxious once things went well that it had missed out; six thousand Dalmatians, a fresh levy, went along too, led by the ex-consul Pompeius Silvanus, though real control of decisions lay with Annius Bassus, the legion's commander. Bassus managed Silvanus, a lazy soldier who wasted the days in talk, with a show of deference, quietly and efficiently handling everything that needed doing. To these forces were added the best men from the marines of the Ravenna fleet, who were asking for legionary service; Dalmatians filled out the fleet in their place. The army and its commanders halted their march at Fanum Fortunae, hesitating over overall strategy, because they had heard that the praetorian cohorts had been sent out from Rome and believed the Apennines were held by garrisons; and they themselves, in a region worn out by war, were frightened by shortages and by mutinous soldiers demanding their 'nail money' — the name for a bonus payment. No one had arranged money or grain in advance, and haste and greed got in the way, as men simply grabbed whatever could be had.

52| I have it on the best authority that the victors showed such contempt for right and wrong that a common cavalryman, claiming to have killed his own brother in the recent fighting, actually asked the commanders for a reward. Neither human decency nor the logic of war let them honor or punish that killing. They put it off, as though his service deserved more than could be paid on the spot; nothing further is recorded. But a crime just as monstrous had happened before, in earlier civil wars. In the battle fought at the Janiculum against Cinna, a soldier of Pompey's side killed his own brother, then, on realizing what he had done, killed himself — as Sisenna records. So much sharper among our ancestors, it seems, was remorse for wickedness, just as glory was for virtue. But such stories, drawn from old records, I will bring in without apology whenever the moment calls for an example of right conduct or comfort in the face of wrong.

53| Antonius and the other commanders on his side decided to send cavalry ahead and scout the whole of Umbria, to see if the Apennine ridges could be crossed anywhere more easily; the eagles and standards and whatever troops remained at Verona were to be summoned, and the Po and the sea filled with supply convoys. Among the commanders there were some working to cause delay: Antonius was already too powerful, and more certain instructions were hoped for from Mucianus. Mucianus, anxious over how fast the victory was coming and reckoning that unless he took possession of Rome in person he would have no share in the war's glory, kept writing ambiguous letters to Primus and Varus, arguing now for pressing on, now for the advantages of delay, positioning himself so that, depending how things turned out, he could disown the setbacks or claim the successes. He warned Plotius Grypus more openly — a man Vespasian had lately lifted into the Senate and given a legion to command — and others loyal to him, and all of them wrote back putting an unfavorable spin on Primus's and Varus's haste, in terms that suited Mucianus. Sending these letters on to Vespasian, he managed to have Antonius's plans and actions judged very differently from how Antonius himself hoped.

54| Antonius took this badly and blamed Mucianus, feeling his own dangers had been cheapened by Mucianus's accusations; nor did he hold back in what he said, being reckless with his tongue and impatient of deference. He wrote a letter to Vespasian that read more like a boast than a report to an emperor, with a barely hidden attack on Mucianus running through it: it was he who had roused the Pannonian legions to arms; his prodding that had stirred the commanders in Moesia; his resolve that had forced a way through the Alps, taken Italy, and severed the German and Raetian reinforcements from Vitellius. As for scattering his divided, disorganized legions — first with a cavalry charge, then crushing the infantry through a day and a night of fighting — that, he said, was his own finest work, entirely his doing. The disaster at Cremona should be blamed on the war itself: worse damage, the ruin of more cities, had come from old civil discords before this. He himself served his commander not with messages and letters but with his own hand and arms; nor did he begrudge the glory of those who, meanwhile, had settled Dacia — they had cared about peace in Moesia, he about the safety and security of Italy. It was his own urging that had turned Gaul and Spain, the strongest regions on earth, over to Vespasian. But all that effort would come to nothing if the rewards for the dangers went only to men who had never faced the dangers. None of this was lost on Mucianus; from it grew a bitter rivalry, which Antonius nursed openly and carelessly, and Mucianus cultivated craftily — and so all the more implacably.

55| Meanwhile Vitellius, his fortunes broken at Cremona, hid the news of the defeat, and by this foolish concealment merely postponed the cure for his troubles rather than the troubles themselves. If he had admitted the truth and taken counsel, he still had hope and strength left; instead, by pretending everything was fine, he made matters worse with his lies. A strange silence about the war reigned in his own presence; talk of it was forbidden throughout the city, and for that very reason more people talked — and, being forbidden to tell the truth, spread rumors more terrible than the truth. Nor did the enemy commanders fail to feed the rumor, sending back Vitellius's captured scouts after marching them around so they could see the strength of the winning army for themselves; Vitellius had each one brought to him alone and questioned, then put to death. One centurion, Julius Agrestis, showed remarkable resolve. Having tried again and again, uselessly, to put some courage into Vitellius, he finally won leave to go himself and see with his own eyes what the enemy's strength was and what had truly happened at Cremona. Rather than steal in disguise to trick Antonius, he announced plainly who had sent him and why, and asked that everything be shown to him. He was shown the battlefield, the traces of Cremona, the captured legions. Agrestis returned to Vitellius, and when Vitellius refused to believe what he reported and even accused him outright of having been bought off, he said: 'Since, it seems, you need solid proof, and there's nothing more I can do for you with my life or my death, I'll give you something you can trust.' And with that he left, and confirmed his words with a voluntary death. Some say Vitellius had him killed instead — but they agree just as firmly on his loyalty and resolve.

56| Vitellius, as if jolted from sleep, ordered Julius Priscus and Alfenus Varus to hold the Apennines with fourteen praetorian cohorts and all the cavalry squadrons; a legion of marines followed. So many thousand armed men, picked in horse and manpower, would have been strength enough even for an offensive war, under a different commander. The remaining cohorts he gave to his brother Lucius to guard the city. Vitellius himself cut nothing from his usual luxury, and in his anxiety rushed to hold the elections, naming consuls years in advance; he handed out treaties to allies and Latin rights to foreigners, canceled tribute for some, granted immunities to others—in short, tore the empire apart with no thought for what came after. But the crowd gaped at the size of his gifts; only fools paid money for them, while sensible men counted worthless anything that could not be given or received without harming the state. At last, badgered by the army camped at Mevania, he came to the camp with a great train of senators—many dragged along by ambition, more by fear—unsure of his own mind and at the mercy of untrustworthy advisers.

57| While he was addressing the troops—strange to tell—such a mass of foul birds flew overhead that they blotted out the daylight like a black cloud. Then came a grim omen: a bull tore loose from the altar, scattering the sacrificial gear, and fell dead at a distance, struck down in no manner fit for the rite. But the worst omen of all was Vitellius himself: ignorant of soldiering, careless in planning, asking others how the column should march, how scouting should be done, how hard or how gently to press the war, and at every dispatch showing his fear in his face and his walk—and then getting drunk. Finally, sick of camp life and hearing that the fleet at Misenum had defected, he went back to Rome, dreading each fresh wound while ignoring the gravest danger of all. For while he could have crossed the Apennines with his army's full strength intact and struck the enemy while they were worn down by winter and shortage, in open country, instead he scattered his forces and handed over to slaughter and capture the fiercest of his soldiers, men who would have held out to the last—even though his most seasoned centurions objected and would have spoken the truth to him, had he only asked. It was his inner circle that kept them away: they had trained the emperor's ears to reject anything harsh, however useful, and accept nothing but what was pleasant and would hurt him.

58| But the fleet at Misenum—so much can even one bold individual do amid civil strife—was drawn into defection by the centurion Claudius Faventinus, dishonorably discharged by Galba, who dangled forged letters from Vespasian promising a reward for the betrayal. In command of the fleet was Claudius Apollinaris, a man neither reliably loyal nor energetic in treachery; and Apinius Tiro, a former praetor who happened to be at Minturnae at the time, offered himself as leader to the defectors. Under their prompting the towns and colonies were stirred up—Puteoli especially eager for Vespasian, while Capua, in rivalry, stayed loyal to Vitellius—dragging municipal jealousies into the civil war. Vitellius chose Claudius Julianus, who had recently commanded the Misenum fleet with a light hand, to calm the soldiers' tempers; a city cohort and a troop of gladiators under Julianus's command were sent to help him. But when the two camps met, Julianus went over to Vespasian's side with hardly a moment's hesitation, and together they seized Tarracina, a place made safe more by its walls and position than by any skill of its defenders.

59| When this news reached Vitellius, he left part of his forces with the praetorian prefects at Narnia and sent his brother Lucius with six cohorts and five hundred cavalry to meet the war advancing through Campania. He himself, sick at heart, was revived by the soldiers' enthusiasm and the crowd's shouts demanding weapons—calling an idle mob that would never dare more than words his 'army' and his 'legions,' though the show was false. On his freedmen's urging—for among his friends, the more distinguished a man was, the less loyal—he ordered the tribes summoned and made those who enrolled swear the military oath. As the numbers overflowed, he split the task of recruiting between the consuls; he demanded slaves and silver by weight from the senators. Roman knights offered their service and their money, and even freedmen volunteered the same, unprompted. This show of duty, born of fear, turned gradually into real sympathy—and most people pitied not Vitellius himself so much as the wretched state of the throne he held. He himself was not above using his face, his voice, his tears to win pity, lavish with promises, and, as fear tends to be, excessive. He even wanted to be called Caesar, a title he had once scorned, but now took up out of superstitious hope in the name—and because in times of fear, the advice of the wise and the rumors of the crowd get listened to equally. But as everything begun in a rash burst is strong at the start and fades with time, senators and knights began slipping away, at first cautiously and only when he was not present, then openly and without discretion, until Vitellius, ashamed of his failed effort, stopped demanding what was no longer given.

60| Just as the seizure of Mevania had struck terror through Italy, as though the war had been reborn from scratch, so Vitellius's panicked retreat left no doubt about where loyalty to the Flavian cause now lay. The Samnites, the Paeligni, and the Marsi, roused to compete because Campania had gotten there first, threw themselves eagerly into every task of the war, like men new to an alliance proving themselves. But the army suffered badly crossing the Apennines in foul winter weather, and even with the column moving undisturbed, struggling through the snow showed how great the danger would have been had fortune not turned Vitellius back—fortune which helped the Flavian commanders no less often than good judgment did. There they met Petilius Cerialis, who had slipped past Vitellius's guards in peasant dress, using his knowledge of the country. Cerialis was closely related to Vespasian, and no mean soldier himself, so he was taken on among the commanders. Many say that Flavius Sabinus and Domitian, too, had a chance to escape; messengers sent by Antonius made their way in through various tricks of disguise, pointing out places and protection. Sabinus pleaded that his health was unfit for the hardship and daring required. Domitian had the nerve for it, but the guards Vitellius had set on him, though they promised to flee with him, were feared as likely traitors. And Vitellius himself, out of regard for his own family ties, was planning nothing violent against Domitian.

61| When the Flavian commanders reached Carsulae, they took a few days' rest, waiting for the eagles and standards of the legions to catch up. The camp's location itself pleased them—wide views, safe supply lines, and prosperous towns behind them—while they also hoped for talks, and perhaps betrayal, with the Vitellians camped ten miles off. The soldiers took this badly; they wanted victory, not peace, and would not even wait for their own legions, preferring comrades for plunder rather than for danger. Antonius called them to assembly and told them Vitellius still had forces—forces that would waver if they hesitated, but fight fiercely if driven to despair. The openings of civil wars should be left to fortune; victory is achieved by planning and reason. Already the Misenum fleet and the loveliest coast of Campania had defected, and Vitellius had nothing left in the whole world but the strip of land between Tarracina and Narnia. Glory enough had been won at the battle of Cremona, and too much resentment earned by Cremona's destruction; they should not crave to capture Rome rather than save it. Greater rewards, and by far the greatest honor, awaited them if they secured the safety of the senate and people of Rome without bloodshed. These words, and others like them, calmed their tempers.

62| Not long after, the legions arrived. Swelled by rumor and the terror of the enlarged army, the Vitellian cohorts began to waver; no one urged them to fight, while many competed to desert, each eager to hand over his century or squadron as a gift to the victor and a favor banked for the future. From these deserters came word that a cavalry garrison four hundred strong held Interamna, on the plains nearby. At once Varus set out with a small detachment; he cut down the handful who resisted, while the rest threw down their weapons and begged for mercy. Some fled back to camp, filling it with panic, exaggerating by rumor the enemy's strength and numbers to soften the shame of the lost outpost. Among the Vitellians no penalty was imposed for such disgrace, and since rewards went to deserters, loyalty flipped, and what remained was a contest in treachery. Tribunes and centurions deserted constantly; the common soldiers, though, had hardened in support of Vitellius, until Priscus and Alfenus abandoned the camp and went back to Vitellius, releasing everyone else from any shame in following them.

63| In those same days Fabius Valens was executed in custody at Urbino. His head was displayed to the Vitellian cohorts to crush any lingering hope, for they believed Valens had made it through to the Germanies and was raising both the old armies and new ones there; seeing the severed head, they sank into despair. For the Flavian side, word of Valens's death was taken as marking the war's end, and their confidence swelled beyond measure. Valens, born at Anagnia to a family of knights, was reckless by nature and not without wit, and chased a reputation for sophistication through indecency. In Nero's Juvenalia he had performed as if forced to it, then later took to acting in farces by choice, with more skill than decency. As legion commander he both supported Verginius and slandered him; he corrupted Fonteius Capito—or, unable to corrupt him, killed him instead. He betrayed Galba, stayed loyal to Vitellius, and was made to look good only by comparison with other men's treachery.

64| With every hope cut off from every side, the Vitellian troops prepared to go over to the other side — and did even that with a certain dignity, marching down under their standards and banners into the plain below Narnia. The Flavian army stood drawn up in dense ranks along the road, armed and alert as if for battle. The Vitellians were received into their midst, and Primus Antonius, once they were surrounded, addressed them kindly. Some were ordered to halt at Narnia, others at Interamna. Legions from the winning side were left with them too — not so heavy a presence as to trouble men who stayed quiet, but strong enough against any defiance. All through those days Primus and Varus kept sending Vitellius message after message, offering him safety, money, and a quiet retreat in Campania if he would lay down his arms and hand himself and his children over to Vespasian. Mucianus wrote to the same effect. Vitellius mostly believed these offers, and fell to discussing how many servants he'd keep and which stretch of coast he'd choose. Such numbness had settled over his mind that if others hadn't remembered he'd once been emperor, he himself would have forgotten it.

65| Meanwhile the city's leading men were pressing Flavius Sabinus, the prefect of the city, in private conversations, urging him to claim his share of the victory and the glory. He had troops of his own, they said — the urban cohorts — and the watch cohorts wouldn't fail him either, nor would his own household slaves; fortune favored his side, and everything leaned toward the winners. Why concede all the credit to Antonius and Varus? Vitellius had only a few cohorts left, and they were rattled by grim news arriving from every direction. The mob's loyalty was fickle — if Sabinus stepped forward as leader, the same flattery now aimed at Vitellius would turn toward Vespasian. Vitellius himself had never matched up to good fortune, and now, with everything collapsing, he was even more broken. Whoever seized the city would get the credit for ending the war. It suited Sabinus to keep the throne in reserve for his brother, and it suited Vespasian that everyone else, after Sabinus, should rank behind him.

66| Sabinus, weakened by old age, took in these words without much spirit. But some muttered dark suspicions that jealousy and rivalry made him drag his feet on his brother's fortune. Flavius Sabinus, being the elder, had outranked Vespasian in prestige and wealth back when both were private citizens, and it was believed he'd been stingy in propping up Vespasian's shaky credit, taking his house and land as collateral. So although the two kept up an appearance of harmony, people feared old grievances lay hidden beneath it. A kinder reading is that Sabinus, a gentle man, recoiled from bloodshed and killing, and so kept holding frequent talks with Vitellius about peace and about laying down arms on agreed terms. They met often at each other's houses, and finally, so the story goes, struck their bargain in the Temple of Apollo. Two witnesses had heard their words: Cluvius Rufus and Silius Italicus. Onlookers watching from a distance noted their expressions — Vitellius's slack and abject, Sabinus's not gloating, closer to pity.

67| If Vitellius had been able to bend the minds of his own men as easily as he himself had given in, Vespasian's army would have entered the city without a drop of blood spilled. But the more loyal a man was to Vitellius, the harder he pushed back against peace and terms, pointing to the danger and disgrace of it, and to how little a victor's word could be trusted once his lust for power took hold. Vespasian, they said, wasn't so arrogant as to let Vitellius live as a private citizen — even the defeated wouldn't stand for that; so mercy itself was a danger. Vitellius was an old man, they granted, worn out by both good luck and bad — but what name, what standing, would be left for his son Germanicus? For now they promised money, household, and the pleasant bays of Campania — but once Vespasian held power, not he, not his friends, not even his own legions would ever sleep easy while his rival still breathed. Fabius Valens, a mere captive held in reserve for whatever fate brought, had already proven too dangerous to them — so how much less would Primus, Fuscus, and Mucianus, the very face of the Flavian party, allow Vitellius anything but death? Pompey hadn't been left alive by Caesar, nor Antony by Augustus — unless Vespasian, of all people, meant to rise above that pattern, he who'd been Vitellius's own client while Vitellius sat as Claudius's colleague in office. No — to honor his father's censorship, his three consulships, the many distinguished honors of his house, he ought at least, out of sheer desperation, to nerve himself to boldness. The soldiers still stood firm, the people's goodwill remained; nothing worse could happen than what they'd bring on themselves by rushing in. The defeated must die, and so must those who surrender — the only question left was whether they'd breathe their last amid mockery and abuse, or with courage.

68| Vitellius's ears were deaf to bold counsel. His spirit was crushed by pity and by worry that stubborn resistance would leave the victor less inclined to spare his wife and children. He still had a mother too, worn out with age, though she died a timely death a few days before, sparing her the ruin of her house — she'd gained nothing from her son's reign but grief and a good name. On December 18th, hearing that the legion and cohorts that had surrendered at Narnia had gone over, he came down from the Palace dressed in mourning black, his household grieving around him. His small son was carried in a litter as if in a funeral procession. The people's cries were fawning and badly timed; the soldiers kept a menacing silence.

69| No one so forgot what it is to be human that the sight didn't move him — a Roman emperor, lord of the human race only a moment before, leaving the seat of his own power, walking out through the people and the city, resigning his rule. Nothing like it had ever been seen or heard of. A sudden burst of violence had struck down the dictator Caesar; a hidden conspiracy had done for Gaius; night and an unknown countryside had hidden Nero's flight; Piso and Galba had fallen as if in battle. But Vitellius, before his own assembly, among his own soldiers, with even the women watching, spoke a few words fitting his grim moment — he was stepping down for the sake of peace and the republic; let them only keep his memory, and pity his brother, his wife, and his children too young to have done wrong. Then he held out his son, urging him first on one man, then on the crowd as a whole, and finally, tears choking his voice, he unbuckled the dagger at his side and offered it to the consul standing beside him, Caecilius Simplex, as if handing over the power of life and death over citizens. The consul refused it, and the crowd at the assembly cried out against it, so Vitellius set off, meaning to lay the imperial insignia in the Temple of Concord and go to his brother's house. But an even louder outcry rose from those blocking him near private houses, calling him back to the Palace. Every other route was closed; only the road onto the Sacred Way stood open. Then, out of ideas, he turned back to the Palace.

70| Rumor had run ahead that he'd renounced power, and Flavius Sabinus had already written to the tribunes of the cohorts telling them to hold their men back. So, as if the whole state had already dropped into Vespasian's lap, the leading men of the senate, most of the equestrian order, and all the urban troops and watchmen crowded into Flavius Sabinus's house. Word reached them there of the crowd's mood and of threats from the German cohorts. He'd gone too far now to pull back; and each man, out of his own fear that the scattered and weakened Vitellians might hunt them down, kept pushing the hesitant Sabinus toward armed action. But as usually happens in such matters, everyone gave advice and few took the risk. As those with Sabinus marched down near the Fundanian lake, they ran into the most eager of the Vitellian troops. A small fight broke out in the sudden chaos, but it went the Vitellians' way. In the confusion Sabinus took refuge in the one safe place left — the Capitoline citadel — with a mixed force of soldiers and some senators and knights, whose names aren't easy to give, since after Vespasian's victory many pretended to this service to his cause. Even women endured the siege, most notably Verulana Gratilla, who followed the war not for children or kin but for its own sake. The Vitellian soldiers surrounded them, though their guard was careless, and so, deep in the night, Sabinus called his own children and his brother's son Domitian up into the Capitol, sending word through the gaps in the blockade to the Flavian commanders that they were under siege and, without relief, in dire straits. He passed so quiet a night that he could have slipped away unharmed — the Vitellian soldiers, fierce enough facing real danger, were careless about watch-duty and sentry work, and a sudden winter downpour blinded eyes and muffled ears.

71| At first light, before the two sides could come to blows, Sabinus sent Cornelius Martialis, one of the senior centurions, to Vitellius with instructions and a complaint that the agreement was being broken — the whole show of laying down power had been nothing but a trick to deceive so many distinguished men. Why else go from the Rostra to his brother's house, right over the Forum and in plain view of everyone, instead of to the Aventine and his wife's home? That would have suited a private man trying to avoid every appearance of power. Instead Vitellius had gone back to the Palace, the very stronghold of his rule; from there he'd sent out an armed column, strewn the busiest part of the city with the bodies of the innocent, and not even spared the Capitol. Sabinus, Martialis reminded him, was a civilian, one senator among many; while the contest between Vespasian and Vitellius was being decided by battles of legions, the capture of cities, the surrender of cohorts, with Spain, the Germanies, and Britain already breaking away, Vespasian's own brother had stayed loyal until he himself was invited to make terms. Peace and concord were useful to the defeated, but to the victors merely glorious. If Vitellius regretted the bargain, he shouldn't turn his sword on the man his own broken faith had deceived, nor on Vespasian's son, barely past boyhood — what would be gained by killing one old man and one youth? Let him go out and meet the legions instead, and fight the whole contest out there; everything else would follow from how that battle went. Vitellius, flustered, answered with a few words in his own defense, laying the blame on his soldiers, whose excess of zeal, he said, his own restraint couldn't match. He warned Martialis to slip away by a hidden passage through the house, for fear the soldiers would kill the messenger of a peace they hated. As for himself, he was no longer in a position to command or forbid anything — no longer emperor, just a reason for the war to go on.

72| Martialis had barely got back to the Capitol when the soldiers were on them in a fury, with no commander, each man his own leader. Sweeping fast through the Forum, past the temples that overlooked it, they formed up on the slope across the way, right to the gates of the Capitoline citadel. There were old colonnades on the right side of the climb; the attackers got up onto their roofs and pelted the Vitellians below with stones and tiles. Their only weapons were swords, and it seemed too slow to send for catapults or javelins, so they threw torches instead, following the flames. They would have burst through the Capitol's scorched gates had Sabinus not pulled down statues from every side — monuments of the ancestors — and piled them across the entrance as a makeshift wall. Then they attacked the other approaches to the Capitol at once, by the grove of the Asylum and by the hundred steps up the Tarpeian Rock. Both assaults caught the defenders off guard; the one through the Asylum came harder and faster. Men climbing over the connecting buildings, which in the long peace had been raised as high as the level of the Capitol itself, could not be stopped. Here it is disputed whether the attackers set fire to the roofs or the besieged did, in beating back men who kept pressing forward and climbing — that is the more common account. From there the fire spread to the colonnades next to the temples; then the eagles supporting the pediment, being of old timber, caught and fed the flames. So the Capitol burned with its doors shut, undefended and unplundered.

73| This was the most grievous and shameful disaster to befall the Roman state since the city was founded. No foreign enemy was involved — the gods, so far as our conduct allowed, were well disposed — and yet the shrine of Jupiter Best and Greatest — founded by our ancestors under favorable auspices as the pledge of empire — was destroyed by the madness of our own leaders, though neither Porsenna managed to defile it when the city yielded to him, nor the Gauls when they captured it. The Capitol had burned once before, in civil war, but that was private treachery; this time it was besieged openly, burned openly. And for what cause of arms? At what price was so great a disaster bought? Was this fought for our country? It was King Tarquinius Priscus who vowed the temple during the Sabine war and laid its foundations, driven more by hope for Rome's future greatness than by what the still-modest resources of the Roman people could then match. Later Servius Tullius completed it with the help of Rome's allies, then Tarquinius Superbus with spoils from the enemy after the capture of Suessa Pometia. But the glory of finishing it was reserved for liberty: after the kings were expelled, Horatius Pulvillus, in his second consulship, dedicated it with a magnificence that the immense wealth of Rome would later adorn rather than increase. It was rebuilt on the same site after burning again, four hundred and fifteen years later, in the consulship of Lucius Scipio and Gaius Norbanus. Sulla took charge of the rebuilding as victor but did not live to dedicate it — the one thing fortune denied him. The name of Lutatius Catulus remained on it, amid all the great works of the Caesars, right up to Vitellius. It was this temple that now burned.

74| But the fire caused more panic among the besieged than among the besiegers. The Vitellian soldiers, amid the confusion, were short on neither cunning nor nerve; on the other side, the men were frightened, their commander sluggish and seemingly stupefied — he could neither follow what he heard nor make himself heard, could not be guided by others' advice nor settle on his own, was spun this way and that by the enemy's shouting, forbidding what he had just ordered and ordering what he had just forbidden. Soon, as happens when things fall apart, everyone gave orders and no one obeyed them; in the end they threw down their arms and looked only for ways to run and to hide. The Vitellians broke in and mixed everything together with blood, iron, and fire. A few soldiers dared to fight — among them notably Cornelius Martialis, Aemilius Pacensis, Casperius Niger, and Didius Scaeva — and were cut down. Flavius Sabinus, unarmed and not trying to flee, was surrounded, along with the consul Quintius Atticus, who was marked out by the shadow of his office and by his own vanity — he had put up proclamations, magnificent toward Vespasian and abusive toward Vitellius. The rest escaped through various strokes of luck, some disguised as slaves, others hidden by the loyalty of dependents or stowed among the baggage. Some, by learning the password the Vitellians used to recognize one another, brazenly asked it or answered it and made their audacity their hiding place.

75| Domitian, at the first break-in, was hidden by the temple caretaker; through the cleverness of a freedman he was disguised in a linen robe and mixed in unrecognized among a crowd of temple attendants, then took refuge with Cornelius Primus, a client of his father's, near the Velabrum. When his father came to power, he had the caretaker's lodging pulled down and set up a small shrine there to Jupiter the Preserver, with an altar showing his own escape carved in marble; later, once he himself became emperor, he built a huge temple to Jupiter the Guardian and dedicated himself within the god's embrace. Sabinus and Atticus, loaded with chains, were brought before Vitellius, who received them with words and looks that were not hostile at all — to the fury of men demanding the right to kill and rewards for their service. A shout rose from the crowd nearby, and the meaner sort of the mob demanded Sabinus's execution, mixing threats with flattery. Vitellius stood on the steps of the palace and was about to plead for him when they forced him to give way; then Sabinus's body was stabbed, mutilated, and beheaded, and the headless trunk was dragged to the Gemonian Stairs.

76| Such was the end of a man not to be dismissed lightly. He had served thirty-five years in public life, distinguished both at home and in the field. His honesty and fairness could not be faulted; he talked too much — that was the one thing rumor could pin on him in the seven years he governed Moesia and the twelve he held the prefecture of Rome. Toward the end of his life, some thought him lazy, many thought him restrained and sparing of citizens' blood. On one point everyone agreed: before Vespasian's reign began, the honor of the family belonged to Sabinus. We are told that Mucianus was glad to hear of his death. Many said it also served peace, by removing the rivalry between two men, one of whom thought of himself as the emperor's brother, the other as his partner in power. But Vitellius resisted the people's demand for the consul's execution, in a placating mood and, as it were, settling a debt: when asked who had set the Capitol ablaze, Atticus had claimed responsibility himself, and whether that confession was a convenient lie or not, he seemed by it to have drawn the blame and the hatred onto his own head, clearing Vitellius of it.

77| In these same days Lucius Vitellius, camped near Feronia, threatened Tarracina with destruction; the gladiators and oarsmen shut up inside dared neither leave the walls nor risk a fight in the open. In command, as noted earlier, were Julianus over the gladiators and Apollinaris over the oarsmen, men who in their laxness and carelessness resembled their gladiators more than commanders. They kept no watches, strengthened no weak points in the walls; night and day they lounged about, loud over the pleasures of the shore, scattering the soldiers to serve their appetites, and only talked of the war over their dinners. A few days before, Apinius Tiro had left, and by harshly extorting gifts and money from the towns he was adding more resentment than strength to their cause.

78| Meanwhile a slave of Vergilius Capito deserted to Lucius Vitellius and promised, if given a force, to hand over the citadel undefended. Deep in the night Vitellius stationed light-armed cohorts on the heights above the enemy's heads; from there the troops rushed down more to slaughter than to fight. They cut down unarmed men, men just reaching for their weapons, some still roused from sleep, all thrown into confusion by darkness, panic, the blare of trumpets, and the enemy's shouting. A few gladiators resisted and did not fall unavenged; the rest rushed for the ships, where everything collapsed in the same terror, mixed in with civilians whom the Vitellians slaughtered without distinction. Six light warships escaped in the first chaos, carrying the fleet commander Apollinaris; the rest were caught on the shore, or swamped and swallowed by the sea under the crush of men climbing aboard. Julianus was brought before Lucius Vitellius, beaten bloody, and had his throat cut in front of him. Some accused Vitellius's wife Triaria of having girded herself with a soldier's sword and behaved with arrogant cruelty amid the slaughter and the capture of Tarracina. Vitellius himself sent word of his success to his brother, asking at once whether he should return immediately or press on to subdue Campania. This turned out to be a stroke of luck not only for Vespasian's cause but for the state itself. For if his soldiers, flush with a fresh victory and, on top of their natural stubbornness, emboldened by success, had marched straight on Rome, the fighting would have been no small affair, and the city would hardly have escaped ruin. For Lucius Vitellius, disreputable as he was, had real energy — not strong through virtues, as good men are, but the way the very worst men are strong through their vices.

79| While this was happening on Vitellius's side, Vespasian's army had left Narnia and was spending the festival of Saturn idly at Ocriculum. The reason for so ill-timed a delay was that they were waiting for Mucianus. Some suspected Antonius of dragging things out deliberately, after secret letters from Vitellius offering him a consulship, his marriageable daughter, and a rich dowry as the price of betrayal. Others called this invention, made up to please Mucianus. Some thought it the deliberate plan of all the commanders, to display the threat of war against the city rather than actually wage it, since Vitellius's strongest cohorts had already deserted him, and with every resource cut off he seemed bound to give up his power anyway. But the whole plan was undone, first by haste, then by Sabinus's cowardice — he had taken up arms without due thought and proved unable to hold the massively fortified Capitoline citadel, one that even large armies could scarcely have stormed, against a mere three cohorts. It would not be easy to lay the blame on any one man for a fault that was everyone's. Mucianus, with his ambiguous letters, was holding back the victors; Antonius, through untimely deference — or perhaps while trying to shift the blame onto others — earned some of it himself; and the rest of the commanders, thinking the war already finished, in fact only marked its true end. Not even Petilius Cerialis, sent ahead with a thousand cavalry to enter the city by the Salarian Way, cutting across through Sabine territory, had moved fast enough — not until the news of the Capitol under siege roused everyone at once.

80| Antonius reached Saxa Rubra by the Via Flaminia very late at night, coming too late to help. There he learned that Sabinus had been killed, the Capitol had burned, the city was in turmoil, everything was grim. He also heard that Vitellius now had the common people and the slaves under arms. As for Petilius Cerialis, a cavalry battle had gone badly for him: careless, he had charged in as though facing a beaten enemy, and the Vitellians met him with infantry interspersed among their own cavalry. The fighting happened close to the city, among buildings, gardens, and winding streets — ground the Vitellians knew and their enemies did not, which bred fear. Nor was all the cavalry united; some who had recently surrendered at Narnia had joined them, still watching to see which side fortune would favor. The prefect of a cavalry squadron, Julius Flavianus, was captured; the rest were routed in disgraceful flight, though the victors did not pursue past Fidenae.

81| This success fired up the people. The city mob took up arms. A few got military shields; more grabbed whatever weapon came to hand and demanded the signal to fight. Vitellius thanked them and ordered a sortie to defend the city. Soon he called the senate and chose envoys to go to the armies, to urge unity and peace under cover of the public interest. The envoys met different fates. Those who reached Petilius Cerialis came to the brink of disaster — the soldiers rejected any terms of peace. The praetor Arulenus Rusticus was wounded; the outrage was made worse, on top of the violation owed an envoy and a praetor, by the man's own personal standing. His attendants were beaten, and the lictor nearest him was killed for daring to push back the crowd. Had the general not sent a guard to protect them, the civil frenzy would have trampled even the sacred rights of envoys — honored among foreign peoples — right at the gates of their own homeland, and driven it to the death. Those who went to Antonius were received more civilly, not because his soldiers were gentler, but because their commander had more authority.

82| Musonius Rufus, a man of equestrian rank devoted to philosophy and Stoic doctrine, had mixed himself in with the envoys. Pushing among the armed companies, he began lecturing on the blessings of peace and the dangers of war, trying to counsel the soldiers. Most found it ridiculous, more found it tiresome; some would have shoved and trampled him had the calmer men not warned him off and others threatened him, so he dropped his ill-timed wisdom. The Vestal Virgins also came out to meet them, bearing a letter from Vitellius to Antonius: he asked for one day's delay before the final battle — if they granted the postponement, he said, everything would be more easily settled. The virgins were sent back with honor; but the answer written to Vitellius said plainly that Sabinus's killing and the Capitol's burning had put an end to any dealing over the war.

83| Still, Antonius sought to calm the legions; he called an assembly and proposed that they pitch camp by the Mulvian Bridge and wait until the next day to enter the city. He delayed out of fear that troops hardened by fighting would show mercy to no one — not the people, not the senate, not even the gods' temples and shrines. Yet the soldiers took any delay to be victory's enemy; and besides, standards gleaming along the hills, though only unwarlike civilians followed them, had already given the look of a hostile army. The column advanced in three divisions: one, as it had been positioned, along the Via Flaminia; one along the bank of the Tiber; the third approached the Colline Gate by the Via Salaria. The common people were scattered by a cavalry charge; the Vitellian soldiers met them with three defensive positions of their own. Many scattered clashes took place before the city, but the Flavian side, better led, generally had the better of them. The only troops who ran into real trouble were those who had veered off to the left toward the Gardens of Sallust, through narrow and slippery streets. The Vitellians, standing on the garden walls, kept them off with stones and javelins until late in the day, until they were surrounded by cavalry that had broken in through the Colline Gate. There was also fighting between opposing lines on the Campus Martius. Fortune and a long run of victories favored the Flavians; the Vitellians charged in from sheer desperation, and though beaten back, kept regrouping within the city.

84| The people watched the fighting as spectators, and as in a staged contest, cheered and applauded first one side, then the other. Whenever one side gave ground, men hiding in shops or houses they'd fled to were dragged out and demanded to be killed — and the crowd got the greater share of the plunder that way, since the soldiers, bent on blood and slaughter, let the spoils go to the mob. The whole city wore a savage, grotesque face: in one place battle and wounds, in another baths and cookshops; blood and heaps of corpses side by side with whores and men who looked like whores. All the lusts of a life of luxury and idleness, all the crimes of the most brutal captivity, together — you would have thought the same city was raging with fury and running wild with pleasure at once. Armed armies had clashed in the city before — twice under Sulla, once under Cinna — and there had been no less cruelty then. But now there was an inhuman indifference, and not for one instant did the pleasures stop; as if it were a holiday and this violence just one more delight added to it, people rejoiced, indulged themselves, cared nothing for either side, glad of the nation's disasters.

85| The hardest fighting of all was the assault on the [Praetorian] camp, which the fiercest men held onto as their last hope. This made the victors press harder, especially the veteran cohorts, who brought up together every device ever devised for destroying the strongest cities — the tortoise formation, siege engines, earthworks, firebrands — shouting that all the toil and danger of so many battles would be crowned by this one action. The city, they said, belonged to the senate and the Roman people; the temples had been restored to the gods; a soldier's own glory lay in his camp — that was his homeland, those were his household gods. If they weren't let back in at once, they'd spend the night under arms. On the other side, the Vitellians, though outnumbered and doomed, clung to the last comfort left the defeated: disturbing the victory, delaying the peace, drenching homes and altars in blood. Many, half-dead, breathed their last atop the towers and battlements of the walls. When the gates were finally torn down, the remaining knot of them faced the victors and fell, every one, with wounds to the front, turned toward the enemy — even in dying, they took care that their end should be honorable.

86| When the city was taken, Vitellius was carried in a litter through the back of the Palatium to his wife's house on the Aventine, meaning to slip away to Tarracina and his brother's cohorts if he could survive the day in hiding. But then, with the fickleness natural to him — and it's the nature of fear that whatever is present seems worst to a man dreading everything — he went back to the Palatium, now vast and deserted, even the lowest of the slaves having slipped away or avoiding the sight of him. The emptiness and the silent rooms terrified him; he tried locked doors, shuddered at empty ones; exhausted by his miserable wandering, he hid himself away in a shameful hiding place, from which the tribune Julius Placidus dragged him out. His hands were bound behind his back, his clothes torn, and he was led through the streets, a wretched sight, while many hurled abuse and no one wept — the ugliness of his end had drained away any pity. One of the German soldiers who met him struck at him savagely in anger — or perhaps meaning to spare him the mockery sooner — it was never clear whether he had really been aiming at the tribune; he cut off the tribune's ear and was cut down himself on the spot.

87| They forced Vitellius, at sword-point, to keep lifting his face and offering it to their insults — to watch his own statues come crashing down, to stare over and over at the Rostra and at the place where Galba had died — and at last they drove him toward the Gemonian Stairs, the very spot where Flavius Sabinus's body had lain. One remark of his was remembered as not unworthy of the man: when a tribune taunted him, he answered that he had, after all, once been that tribune's emperor. Then he went down under a rain of blows. And the mob abused him dead with the very same shameless zeal with which they had once flattered him living.

88| His father was from Luceria. He was in his fifty-seventh year. His consulship, his priesthoods, his name and rank among the leading men — none of it he had earned by his own effort; all of it came from his father's fame. Men who had never known him gave him the throne. Rarely has any man won the devotion of an army through good qualities as thoroughly as this man won it through sheer laziness. Still, there was a simplicity and generosity in him which, without restraint, turn ruinous. Because he thought friendships were held together by the size of his gifts rather than by steadiness of character, he earned more goodwill than he ever kept. It was unquestionably in the state's interest that Vitellius be beaten — but those who betrayed Vitellius to Vespasian, having already deserted Galba, cannot claim credit for loyalty.

89| As night fell fast, the senate could not be convened, because the magistrates and senators, terrified, had scattered from the city or were hiding in the houses of their clients. Once there was no more fear of the enemy, a crowd of soldiers, still under arms as they were, brought Domitian forward to the leaders of their party, hailed him as Caesar, and escorted him in a great throng to his father's house.

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