69 AD: The Year of Four Emperors
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Tacitus devotes a single sentence to this trek: “Caecina led his legionaries, in formation and laden down with baggage, through the Alps while they were still wintry.” As a result, he is often criticized for an indifference to terrain and for belittling Caecina’s magnificent achievement. This is unjustifiable. Even if the winter of 68/69 had not been mild, there would have been nothing particularly epic about what was in fact the third crossing of the pass. The trip had already been made from south to north by the messengers of the ala Siliana, and from north to south by the auxiliaries Caecina sent to reinforce the squadron. By Tacitus’ day too, elaborate descriptions of armies struggling through the Alps were trite beyond belief. And most important of all, Tacitus recognized that the telling detail was not the crossing of the mountains, even if it was made much earlier than expected by friend or foe. It was Caecina’s popping out of the Alps, like a genie out of a bottle, larger than life in his parti-colored cloak and his Gallic trousers.
5
Otho Prepares for War (January and February)
When Otho assassinated Galba on 15 January, he may have had no idea how serious the situation in Germany had become. Galba, from 9 January on, tried to restrict the information he was receiving to his immediate entourage, and—despite Plutarch—Otho cannot have been invited to their meetings. In public, before the guard and in the senate, Galba talked only of a mutiny by two legions. Since mutinies had been brought under control fairly easily in the past, Otho had no more reason than anybody else outside the charmed circle to imagine that this outbreak would be different, especially once he began planning to remove the man everybody thought the source of the troops’ grievances. No doubt he heard the rumors circulating through the city, but he could discount them. Hence Suetonius can tell a story about his own father: Suetonius Laetus served as a military tribune in the war against Vitellius, and he asserted repeatedly that during the campaign “Otho had stated that he would not have made away with Galba, had he not been confident that he could carry through the business without a war.”
Still, there is another way of taking Suetonius Laetus’ story. It is possible that Vinius was leaking the information from Germany to Otho as fast as it came in. This would not contradict Tacitus’ statement that the messages became common knowledge only after Galba’s death. But even if we assume that Otho knew of Vitellius’ activities, it would not follow that his seizure of power was “an act of consummate and suicidal folly.”1 Vitellius was notoriously a glutton and a sluggard, and the correspondence between the two men suggests that Otho started from the assumption that Vitellius would back down when presented with a fait accompli, perhaps pleading as a face-saving measure that his quarrel had been only with Galba. What apparently occurred neither to Otho nor to anybody else for that matter is that gluttons and sluggards do not start revolts, and can hardly be expected to halt them once they get under way. Otho, that is, assessed his rival correctly, but failed to allow for—and without more information could not have allowed for—the influence of Caecina and Valens.
Then too, Otho could not have anticipated that these two would throw away the rule book. Since the assassination of Galba fell in mid-January, and Romans began campaigns normally only in March or April, Otho probably fancied that he had two months or so to rally support. And the same assumption was probably made by the legions he summoned to his aid from the Balkans: Tacitus states explicitly that they arrived late because they did not bestir themselves as they should have done. Again, when Romans believed that what happened in Rome was more important than what occurred elsewhere, and Otho was the emperor in Rome, he could appeal to governors and army commanders throughout the empire and expect them to obey. As many did. He was recognized by the men in charge of a whole string of distant provinces (Dalmatia, Pannonia, Moesia, Syria, Judaea, Egypt, and Africa). And initially he received assurances of support even from the governors of provinces practically under the eyes of the Rhine legions, Narbonese Gaul, Aquitania, and Hispania Tarraconensis. For some of these men possession was nine-tenths of the law. Others, Tacitus says, accepted Otho because they heard of his elevation before they learnt of Vitellius’. But since they accepted him, Otho had reason to believe that if Vitellius challenged him, he would have the time and the troops to meet that challenge. To hold that Otho responded too late to the threat from Caecina and Valens misstates the case.
Otho would not give up easily. At 36 years old, he was not an imposing figure. Suetonius reports that he was of medium height, not a desirable quality in an emperor, whatever the average height of the population.2 He was also splay footed and bandy legged, and as his hair was thin, he wore “a wig so carefully fashioned and fitted to his head than no one suspected it.” The feature on which the sources dwell, however, is his “almost womanish” concern for his appearance. Not only was his body depilated. For fear of looking as if he had not shaved (shaving had been the fashion for some two centuries, and would continue so until Hadrian’s time), he smeared his face with bread poultices every day, a practice used by Roman women to whiten and tighten the skin. Otho’s soldiers never took his behavior amiss, but what we should make of this is another question. The praetorians, after all, had been schooled by Nero to expect such conduct from young men of fashion, and they were themselves open to similar charges. Before long Vitellius’ legionaries would dismiss them too as effeminate idlers. On the other hand, neither Otho nor his followers were to fight like fops and dandies, and to that extent there is reason to doubt the assessments of those with a more austere cast of mind, men like Galba as well as Plutarch.
However much or little Otho knew of Vitellius’ activities on 15 January, as emperor he had to deal first with problems closer to home, the soldiers and the civilians in the city. Once Galba, Vinius, and Piso had been murdered—so says Tacitus, reveling in the ludicrous picture his words summon up—senators, knights, and people emerged from their hiding places and raced one another to the praetorian camp, every one of them fearful of being the last to congratulate the new emperor. They maligned Galba, they praised the soldiers’ “judgment,” and they kissed Otho’s hand. Neither Otho nor his troops were deceived by this onset of loyalty, and the latter supposedly wanted to kill these civilians out of hand. But though Tacitus concedes that Otho was able “by his voice and his expression” to hold the men in check, he plays up the difficulty the new emperor faced in trying to save Marius Celsus from the wrath of praetorians angry that he had been one of Galba’s most faithful supporters. He did so only by pretending to reserve the man for direr punishment in the future. “Otho had the standing to order a crime, but not the standing to prevent one.”
This assessment sets the tone for Tacitus’ presentation of Otho as a ruler whose freedom of action was limited constantly by his links with the guard. This did not make him putty in their hands. It was a symbiotic relationship. Otho needed the praetorians, and needed always to consider their preferences and prejudices, because they were his most devoted and valuable supporters, and loyalty was not to be disregarded in a civil war. And the guardsmen pinned their hopes on Otho, and refused resolutely to trust their officers or the senatorial generals Otho would place over them. Time and again they would decide that these officers and generals were dragging their feet, if not actively obstructing or conspiring against the emperor. Sometimes these suspicions were baseless, sometimes they were not. But they invariably made it difficult for Otho to win over other elements in the population as fully as he would have liked.
The relationship between Otho and the guard is illustrated by the events in the praetorian camp after the murders. Putting the worst interpretation on the situation, Tacitus asserts that “the soldiers now had the last word on everything that was done.” Yet when we look at the steps taken, we see neither a soldiery out of control nor an emperor forced to yield to their whims. True, the guard seized the chance to pick new commanders for themselves, choosing Plotius Firmus and Licinius Proculus to be their prefects, and Flavius Sabinus as prefect of t
he city and commander of the urban cohorts.3 The one objection that could be raised to this lay in the fact that all three men were elected from below rather than designated from above. The choices were reasonable. Plotius Firmus had risen from a ranker or a junior officer to the prefectship of the watch, but this rapid advancement was due to Otho’s predecessors. And since Firmus had supported Otho when Galba was still alive, it was by no means extraordinary for him to move up to prefect of the guard. (Tigellinus had done the same in Nero’s reign.) Of Licinius Proculus we know only that he was a close associate of Otho, elected because presumed to have been an accomplice in the coup. It would emerge later that he was an energetic soldier only on the parade ground, but prefects of the guard were seldom chosen for their military skills. As for Flavius Sabinus, he had served two terms as commander of the urban cohorts under Nero. Galba had replaced him with Ducenius Geminus. Whether or not Geminus survived the bloodletting of 15 January, he could scarcely keep his post. So Sabinus was an obvious choice and, as he was a mediocrity, a safe one too.
Similar reservations can be made apropos of the other issue raised at this time. In all Rome’s armed forces many centurions were supplementing their already considerable income by granting the men time off and exemption from fatigues only in return for the payment of sizable sums. The more money a ranker had, the more determined the centurions were to relieve him of it, until—says Tacitus—every soldier was reduced to a penury he could alleviate only by taking up banditry or menial work. The guard seized their opportunity to clamor for an end to this abuse, and Otho could not ignore their wishes. But since he could not afford to alienate the centurions either, he offered a compromise. From now on the imperial purse would pay the centurions enough to make up for the sums they had been extorting, and the men would be granted their rights free of charge. Even Tacitus concedes that this was “undoubtedly an excellent scheme, later established as a permanent rule of the service by good emperors.”
The interesting aspect of Tacitus’ narrative, nonetheless, is what he fails to say. It is a minor point that nothing indicates that Vitellius had already taken the same steps in Lower Germany, proving that this complaint was not raised only by allegedly venal praetorians. That detail turns up later. What is significant is that Tacitus mentions neither promises nor payment of a donative, though the money was probably available. According to Suetonius, the first document Otho signed as emperor was a grant for 50 million sesterces to help complete Nero’s opulent palace, the Golden House. Whether or not this sum was raised by confiscating Vinius’ ill-gotten gains, it could readily have been diverted to the guard. For all the praetorians’ resentment over Galba’s refusing them the donative Nymphidius had promised, they demanded no money now. Perhaps they believed Galba’s murder reward enough. Perhaps they thought that his death canceled the promises made by Nymphidius—though this would not have absolved Otho from paying a donative to mark his own accession. Or perhaps they regarded the ending of the abuses to which they had been subjected by their centurions as adequate recompense. No matter how we explain their conduct, the lack of demands for a donative proves that the troops were by no means out of control, the emperor by no means their helpless victim.
Once Otho had reassured the soldiery, he made his way from the camp to a senate meeting, to dispel the apprehensions of his peers. We need not credit the story of Dio’s epitomator Zonaras, that the soldiery paraded the heads of Otho’s victims through the house. It was bad enough that the corpses lay in the Forum when the meeting was called. But Otho may have claimed that the praetorians had made him emperor against his wishes (this story appears in Suetonius and in Dio’s other epitomator, Xiphilinus), and so prompted Tacitus’ statement that “the soldiers had the last word on everything that was done.” But since a reluctance to take power or even a refusal of power (recusatio imperii) was a standard feature of the rhetoric employed on such occasions, it is possible that Tacitus was offended, not by what took place in the camp, but by Otho’s spending so much time there instead of going at once to the senate. Like Galba, Otho made the senators wait while he took care of other business. But then, again like Galba, he may have recognized that the senators needed time to assemble. Whatever the truth, Tacitus focuses on the behavior of the audience. Magistrates and senators, he declares, fell over themselves to ensure that Otho was granted the powers of an emperor, and each speaker attempted to paper over any insults or reproaches he had voiced against Otho in the past.
In one sense their servility was predictable. When Romans harbored grudges as a matter of course, Otho’s former critics were very awkwardly placed. Plutarch, surprisingly, states flatly that nobody was given the impression that Otho bore a grudge against him, but he loses this senate meeting in the switch from the Galba to the Otho. Tacitus places the question firmly in the context of this meeting, and promptly undercuts its effect by adding that, since Otho’s reign was so brief, senators never discovered whether he had put aside his enmities, or was waiting for a more suitable occasion to gratify them. The issue is important, because the innuendo reflects a way of thinking to which senators were perhaps especially prone. It was not just that people at every level of Roman society were horrified by the fact as well as the manner of Galba’s assassination, and accepted Otho out of fear more than conviction, let alone affection. No matter what Otho claimed, many were convinced that individuals could no more change their behavior patterns than leopards can their spots. It followed that Otho would not try “to run on honorable lines a principate he had gained by evil means.” He had killed before and he could kill again. Until time proved otherwise, it was safest and easiest to conclude that he was only playing the role of a good emperor.
As best we can tell, nonetheless, Otho had planned a coup that would remove only Galba, his heir, and the three pedagogues—hence the roundabout manner of Laco’s execution later. So when the predictable demands began for a more general settling of accounts, as one group or another clamored for the execution of this alleged criminal or that, Otho’s first and showiest move was to summon Marius Celsus to a ceremony held on the Capitol on the morning of 16 January. In this Otho spared Celsus’ life and praised his loyalty to Galba explicitly. In fact, he made Celsus one of his own intimates and, before too long, one of his principal generals. Even the soldiery, says Tacitus, were impressed by Celsus’ unswerving fidelity to Galba, although that was what had aroused their hostility to him in the first place. The pardoning of Celsus, in other words, was supposed to be a programmatic act that set the character for Otho’s reign.
This done, Otho could yield to widespread demands for the execution of Tigellinus. The ex-prefect may have dropped out of sight in Nero’s last days, but he had not dropped out of mind. He had survived the clamor for his execution in Galba’s reign not only by making a deal with Vinius, but also by withdrawing to Sinuessa, a spa where he was taking the waters. Tacitus minimizes Otho’s role in the affair (it is not clear why), but it was a letter from the emperor that ordered Tigellinus to commit suicide. After an unsuccessful attempt to bribe his way out of his predicament, Tigellinus “delayed shamefully amid the embraces and kisses of his concubines, and at last cut his throat with a razor, disgracing an infamous life with a tardy and dishonorable death.” Apparently emboldened by Otho’s giving up Tigellinus, the people shouted for the execution of Calvia Crispinilla too, Nero’s “mistress of orgies” and the woman who had stirred up Clodius Macer, the errant legionary legate of III Augusta in Africa. This demand Otho refused, in part no doubt because, unlike Galba, he was reluctant to kill women, in part because it ran counter to his claims that he wanted no more deaths among persons of consequence. But as Tacitus observes, there was also the fact that Calvia Crispinilla had connections, wealth, and character. She might not be somebody whom “respectable” aristocrats welcomed into their homes, but nor would they celebrate her execution. So she survived the reigns of Galba, Otho, and Vitellius, witnessed the accession of Vespasian, and lived to a ripe old age.
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br /> For much the same reasons Otho played the strict constitutionalist when it came to the running of the state. He appointed himself and his brother, Salvius Titianus, consuls for January and February, to replace Galba and Vinius. But otherwise he tried to respect the arrangements for consulships long since made for the rest of the year by Nero and Galba. He inserted Verginius Rufus and Pompeius Vopiscus into the list for March and April 69, but this merely shortened the terms of the other consuls-to-be. Besides, the elevation of Verginius may have been prompted by the idea that it would pacify the Rhine legions, while that of Vopiscus was perhaps a gesture to Galba’s few partisans: Vopiscus was linked closely with Vienna, the town that had supported Vindex enthusiastically. Again, as we know from the evidence of inscriptions, Otho did not rush the meetings where his assumption of various powers and positions was ratified formally. The session to confirm his grant of a tribune’s powers was held on 28 February, that for the position of chief priest (Pontifex Maximus) on 9 March. Finally, Otho distributed other priesthoods to senior members of the senate, or to young sprigs of the nobility whom Galba had recalled from exile. And he too brought back prominent senators exiled by Claudius or Nero, presumably with the idea of implanting in the upper reaches of the senate more men who, while they might not care for him, were at least under obligation to him.
The same urge to reassure everybody shows up in the coinage Otho struck in Rome during his first month as emperor. Before the second week in March the mint issued four main types in gold and silver, and each of them seems to have been intended to proclaim not only that Otho was excellently suited to rule, but also that all was well with the empire. One issue advertised “Peace throughout the World” (PAX ORBIS TERRARVM), a second the people’s ability to be free from anxiety (SECVRITAS P. R.). The other two issues are less straightforward. The silver denarii emblazoned CERES AVG(VSTA) are usually taken as Otho’s assertion that there would be no interruption in the supply of grain from Egypt and Africa on which the common people depended for survival. He could make this assertion with confidence: he was recognized by Tiberius Alexander, the prefect of Egypt, as readily as had been his predecessor, while a Neronian freedman named Crescens swung first Carthage and then the rest of the province Africa over to his side, without even waiting for a lead from its new governor, Gaius Vipstanus Apronianus (a Neronian appointee). The question is for whom the message on the denarii was meant. Silver coinage was hardly seen by the common people. Mostly it ended up in the hands of the soldiery and of the upper classes. Since neither troops nor senators had reason to worry about their food supplies, it may be better to take these types as a statement aimed at the upper classes, to tell them that they need not fear the unrest food shortages tended to generate in the city. Finally, there was an issue carrying the legend “The victory of Otho” (VICTORIA OTHONIS).