69 AD: The Year of Four Emperors

by Gwyn Morgan

  The Germanies and the French Riviera Coast

  No matter how old and helpless the Vitellians believed Galba to be, they recognized that he must respond vigorously to any threat of invasion. To keep him off balance and win the war, therefore, they had to achieve two objectives as rapidly as possible. First, they had to cross the Alps as soon as the passes opened. Depending on the weather, this could happen at any time between March and May. Since the winter of 68/69 was mild, the passes were already open in March and Caecina would take advantage of this. But it looks as if he and Valens based their original plan on a crossing in April (this being one reason why Valens prolonged his march through Gaul). Now, the earlier they crossed the Alps, the sooner they could achieve their second objective, seizing control of northern Italy. So long as Galba and any armies he summoned to his aid followed the rule book and began serious preparations around the start of the campaigning season in March (not quite, but near enough to the procedure Otho would adopt), the two Vitellian columns would be able to combine, to defeat the scratch forces Galba could assemble in Italy itself, and to avert a fight with any reinforcements summoned from outside the peninsula by presenting them with a fait accompli.

  Tacitus does not say that the two columns were supposed to coordinate their arrival in northern Italy, to carry out the second part of this plan for a blitzkrieg, but he probably took that for granted. To achieve their aim, Caecina and Valens would have had to finalize their plan before leaving Germany, since communications between them would have been impossible en route. It is not significant that Tacitus talks of Vitellius’ following the two columns with “the main weight of the attack.” That part of the scheme was a sop to the emperor’s vanity. Caecina and Valens disposed of ample troops with which to win the one decisive battle necessary, and they had every incentive to win it before Vitellius arrived. It is no more significant that Caecina had to cover only about a third of the distance Valens’ column would march, since he had to traverse more arduous terrain. And if we accept the idea that when the two men laid their plans in Germany, they had no inkling that the weather would prove so mild, it is not surprising that Caecina started his offensive a month or so before Valens arrived. He was given an unexpected chance to secure a foothold in northern Italy. Even had he found military reasons for ignoring his good fortune, his rivalry with Valens and his high opinion of his own skills would never have let him do so.

  Valens commanded a force drawn from the legions of Lower Germany. This comprised the bulk of legion V Alaudae, probably 4,000 men, and detachments of between 2,000 and 2,600 men apiece from the three other units in the province, I Germanica, XV Primigenia, and XVI.3 He was also given auxiliary forces, numbering between 10,000 and 12,000 men and including the eight Batavian cohorts that, previously attached to XIV Gemina Martia Victrix, had prevented that legion from supporting Nero in his last days. (They were to prove just as unruly during this campaign.) The first task assigned to the column was to march south through Gaul, winning over the inhabitants wherever possible and reducing those who resisted—and it seemed likely that there would be some resistance. The governors of Belgica and Lugdunensis had sworn allegiance to Vitellius, but there were also the provinces of Aquitania and Narbonensis in the south, and both declared for Otho until the threat of force brought them to their senses. Then the column was to invade Italy from the west, by way of the Mont Genèvre Pass (1,860 m), and to emerge near Augusta Taurinorum (Turin).

  Caecina was entrusted with a column drawn from the units in Upper Germany. It was built around an entire legion that had played no visible part in the uprising, XXI Rapax at Vindonissa (Windisch in Switzerland). This seems to have made the men all the more eager to demonstrate their prowess. In addition he was given detachments, again between 2,000 and 2,600 men strong, from IV Macedonica and XXII Primigenia, and auxiliary units totaling some 9,000 to 10,000 men. Setting out from Vindonissa, he was to march southward through the territory of the Helvetians on the western flank of the province Raetia (more or less equivalent to Switzerland). And since no resistance was anticipated there, he was to cross into Italy by way of the Great St. Bernard Pass (2,428 m), and so emerge not far from Mediolanum (Milan).4

  On the day Valens’ column set out, Tacitus tells us, the commander and his men were vastly encouraged by a good omen. For many miles an eagle flew ahead of the column, as if to guide the troops on their way, and it was neither upset nor frightened away when the men raised cheer after cheer. No doubt the incident happened (Suetonius reports it too), and no doubt the troops were delighted to watch a bird whose representation topped the standard of every legion. For us, however, it might have been more helpful had Tacitus specified when exactly the column left Colonia Agrippinensis. As it is, we can only guess, but a date between 12 and 15 January seems likely. The units in Lower Germany ought to have needed about two weeks to get ready for the march south, and to take care of other business too, for example, dealing with Pompeius Propinquus, the loyalist procurator of Belgica, and the four centurions of XXII Primigenia who had tried to stop their troops overthrowing Galba’s statues.

  Tacitus gives us a detailed account of Valens’ itinerary through much of Gaul. Hence we can plot his progress even on a map of modern France, since the column followed in sequence the lines of the Rivers Rhine, Moselle, Saône, and Rhône. Tacitus depicts the march very much as a descent into anarchy, a chapter of accidents, each demonstrating more clearly than its predecessor Valens’ loss of control over his men and over himself. The slide began when the troops reached Divodurum (Metz), the principal town of the Mediomatrici. Here they suddenly set about slaughtering the inhabitants, not from a wish for plunder, but “from a kind of madness difficult to diagnose and so all the more difficult to stop.” Some 4,000 natives were supposedly killed before the troops were calmed by their general’s entreaties. Yet there was an upside. This incident so terrorized the rest of the country that, from now on, every community would open its gates without delay and all but grovel in the dirt the moment the column appeared.

  News of Galba’s murder and Otho’s accession reached the column as it was marching through the territory of the Leuci, in the neighborhood of Tullum (Toul), apparently toward the end of January. The news made no difference. The troops were neither alarmed that Otho had seized power in Rome nor gratified that Galba was dead. They wanted war, and when they moved into the territory of the Lingones, the joy with which these allies received them turned quickly to consternation. Here Valens picked up the eight Batavian cohorts that had been assigned to his column (they had wintered in the area), and a fight soon broke out between the legionaries and the Batavians. The latter never tired of boasting how they had prevented legion XIV Gemina Martia Victrix from aiding Nero and so how they had determined the outcome of that war. Much as the legionaries respected the Batavians’ fighting abilities, they found their arrogance hard to swallow. Hence the fight, which imperiled the tribesmen caught in the middle, and would allegedly have evolved into a full-scale battle, had not Valens intervened and restored order by punishing a few of the auxiliaries.

  For all the havoc the Vitellians caused in the lands of their allies, they were unable to find a pretext for attacking a tribe that qualified as an enemy, Vindex’s erstwhile friends the Aedui, who lay to the west of their line of march. The Aedui not only handed over the money and matériel asked of them, but contributed supplies too. What the tribesmen did from fear, says Tacitus, the population of Lugdunum (Lyon) did from joy. It too was cut short, however, when Valens decided to incorporate into his column the principal forces stationed in the city, legion I Italica and the ala Tauriana, its squadron of auxiliary cavalry, and to leave behind only the resident urban cohort (cohors XVIII urbana). This move nearly cost him dear. The inhabitants seized this opportunity to even scores with their hated rivals, the people of Vienna (Vienne), spurred on all the more by the fact that in this feud the Viennenses then had the upper hand. When Lugdunum had shut its gates against Vindex in 68, the Vienn
enses had promptly supported the rebel, and had been richly rewarded by Galba at Lugdunum’s expense.

  The moment the citizenry learnt of Valens’ decision, they began working on the sympathies of his men. Stressing the help the Viennenses had given Vindex, they exaggerated beyond recognition the threat they posed to a Lugdunum stripped of its garrison. So successful was their agitation that the troops were eager to march on Vienne and sack the town. Valens naturally tried to stop this. He may have recognized that the allegations were largely rhetoric, deriving his knowledge from Manlius Valens, as legate of I Italica the man on the spot. But since he disencumbered himself promptly of his namesake, it is just as likely that Valens thought the locals’ complaints justified and refused to act anyway. He could argue that legion I Italica made a welcome addition to the strength of his column, whereas leaving the unit behind in Lugdunum risked exposing his rear to attack one day. (Since the legion had been created by Nero and stationed at Lugdunum by Galba, it had no close ties with the Vitellians.) Then too, Vienne was a Roman settlement, however barbarous the citizens of Lugdunum made it out to be. Sacking the town would do irreparable damage to the Vitellian cause, and Valens’ soldiers could scarcely make good progress on the march to Italy if laden down with plunder. Yet, says Tacitus, the men were so out of control that the Viennenses saved themselves only by coming out to meet the army and making an abject surrender—in the traditional Roman manner.

  Since this had the desired effect on the troops’ emotions, their feelings swung to the opposite extreme. It does not matter whether the men were really as fickle and as changeable as our sources declare when they describe scenes like this. What counts is that their leaders thought them so, and had to guard against yet another swing of the pendulum. While Valens disarmed the town and made the citizenry furnish supplies of all kinds, therefore, he also decided to pay the troops 300 sesterces apiece (one-third of their annual pay). Where he found the ten to twelve million sesterces he needed Tacitus does not say, but he probably raised it from the hapless Viennenses. From now on, however, there were to be persistent and disruptive rumors that Valens had enriched himself too. Whether they were true it is difficult to say. That Valens had not wanted the Viennenses to suffer is no proof that his hands were clean or his pockets empty. Conversely, if he made a huge profit in this way, it seems a little strange that, as Tacitus puts it, he trafficked openly in march routes and camp sites in the later stages of the march, and even threatened to burn down Lucus Augusti (Luc-en-Diois), if his demands were not met. Perhaps despoiling the hapless Viennenses whetted his appetite for cash. Or perhaps the poverty of his youth and the strength of these rumors encouraged him to live up to the reputation he had acquired.

  At this point, probably around the end of February, Tacitus breaks off his account of the column’s progress. Yet Lucus Augusti lay in the territory of the Vocontii, several hundred miles and three weeks short of the Alps. For this there seem to be three reasons. First, since the column would continue on its merry way until it reached Turin, Tacitus thought it unnecessary to mention it again until it had to deal with Otho’s maritime expedition. Second, the degeneration in the behavior of men and general alike was now complete, and Tacitus has made his point. And third, as Tacitus tells the story, the nadir in the conduct of Valens’ column is juxtaposed with the low point in the behavior of Caecina’s force, and that low point occurred at the very start of the march. For he presents Caecina’s expedition as the reverse of Valens’, with a progression from the indiscipline of legion XXI Rapax to the masterful generalship with which Caecina took his men through enemy territory and Alps alike.

  Tacitus says nothing about Caecina’s opening moves. Though the meeting at which he and Valens settled their plans must have been held in Vitellius’ HQ at Colonia Agrippinensis, there was no point in Caecina’s tagging along with Valens’ column on the march south. He may have ridden to Mogontiacum, to pick up the detachments from IV Macedonica and XXII Primigenia, and then marched to Vindonissa. Or he may have ordered these detachments to catch up with him by forced marches while he rode straight to Vindonissa. Either way, XXI Rapax had already started a war with the Helvetii. According to Tacitus, the tribesmen were unaware of Galba’s death and refused to acknowledge the troops’ right to demand campaign contributions from them. So when some legionaries seized the money being sent to a small fort the Helvetii maintained on the northern frontier of the province, the tribesmen retaliated by intercepting a small party under a centurion that was carrying letters from the German legions to those in Pannonia, and threw it in prison. At this point Caecina arrived and, “greedy for war,” decided to punish the culprits before they could ask for forgiveness. He sent orders to the auxiliary infantry and cavalry forces stationed on the far side of the Helvetians’ territory to attack from the rear, and marched his force down the Aare valley, killing all who opposed him, devastating their lands, and destroying Aquae Helveticae (Baden), a picturesque village already known for its healing springs.

  The Helvetii were no longer the formidable fighters who had faced Caesar a century before. Though defiant at first, they panicked as soon as they were attacked, and since they could not agree on a coordinated plan of resistance, they were crushingly defeated in one engagement after another. When they fled for refuge to the Mons Vocetius (perhaps the Bötzberg, on the left bank of the Aare about half way between Basel and Zürich), they were promptly dislodged by a cohort of Thracian auxiliaries. And when they scattered in the forests, they were hunted down or winkled out of their hiding places by German and Raetian auxiliaries. For the Vitellians the campaign was so obviously a walk-over that Tacitus may be right to claim that “many thousands were killed, many thousands sold into slavery.” Yet all this happened before Caecina even approached their principal settlement, Aventicum (Avenches). Unsurprisingly, its leading citizens surrendered the town unconditionally the moment he appeared at the gates.

  Caecina wound up this campaign by putting to death only one man, Julius Alpinus, alleging that he was responsible for the war. All the other dignitaries he rounded up were sent to Vitellius for judgment and, as Tacitus gleefully reports, they escaped with their lives, thanks largely to the emperor’s ineptitude. Vitellius thought he had an open-and-shut case on his hands and did not expect even a high-born provincial to be much of an orator. So he let the culprits plead their case before the soldiery, and their spokesman, a certain Claudius Cossus, delivered a first-class speech. This worked so effectively on the feelings of the troops that, overcome by unreasoning sentimentality, they pressured Vitellius into pardoning the offenders.

  Caecina probably spent ten more days in Helvetian territory, partly to complete the pacification of the area, partly to rest his men after a campaign that, though short, had been strenuous. Here he received the unexpected news that a squadron of auxiliary cavalry in northern Italy had declared for Vitellius. This was the ala Siliana, quartered in the neighborhood of the River Po as a result of all the to-ing and fro-ing that preceded Nero’s death. Neither the officers nor the men knew anything of Otho, but they had served in Africa when Vitellius governed the province in the early 60s. Besides, they were far more impressed by the strength and the reputation of the Rhine legions than they were with the scratch forces Otho was assembling. The vital point, however, is that as a pledge of their loyalty they also brought over to Vitellius four key towns in the area north of the river, Eporedia, Vercellae, Novaria, and Mediolanum (Ivrea, Vercelli, Novara, and Milan). Recognizing that a unit of 500 men could hardly hold down four towns unaided, Caecina at once sent on ahead a batch of auxiliary infantry (Gallic, Lusitanian, and British cohorts), detachments of German tribesmen (it is unclear if infantry, cavalry, or both are meant), and a cavalry squadron he knew from Mogontiacum, the ala Petriana.

  In the meantime, so says Tacitus, Caecina briefly contemplated marching across the width of Raetia and invading the neighboring province of Noricum (Austria). Its procuratorial governor, Petronius Urbicus, had assembled all
the auxiliary forces at his disposal and had broken down the bridges leading into his province, and so “was thought to be loyal to Otho.” This account Henderson elaborated into an ambitious strategical plan, formulated now by Caecina, to traverse Noricum, to turn south into the Transpadana through the Brenner Pass, to drive a wedge between Otho’s forces in Italy and any support he planned drawing from the Balkan provinces, and to catch the Othonians in Italy between his own army and that of Valens, when the latter emerged from the western end of the Alps. No matter how seductive the thesis may appear, it is mistaken, if only because Tacitus reports the episode in a way showing clearly that Caecina gave only passing thought to an incursion into Noricum. What, then, did Caecina have in mind? If Caecina and Valens had agreed that they would enter northern Italy on a specified date, and if Caecina was well ahead of schedule (as he was), he probably viewed an attack on Noricum as a splendid way of keeping the troops busy until it came time to cross the Alps.

  On further reflection, Caecina decided not only to abandon his plans for Noricum but also to ignore any idea of timing his arrival in northern Italy to coincide with that of Valens. Even without jealousy to spur him on, he had sound military reasons to press ahead. The Alpine passes were already open or, at least, traversable without undue difficulty. He had four towns in the Transpadana under his control and, though reinforced, they would not be able to withstand a sustained Othonian assault such as could be made if he dallied north of the Alps. If he marched into Italy forthwith, on the other hand, he could use the towns as bases from which to make further conquests. So Caecina decided, before the middle of March as far as we can tell, to lead his legionaries through the Great St. Bernard.