69 AD: The Year of Four Emperors

by Gwyn Morgan

  The Othonian troops, who had lined the south bank of the river for the same reason, were so angry that they would have killed Macer when he landed, had not other officers rushed him from the scene. This time the troops had cause to be angry. The casualties must have been high, since Otho ordered Spurinna to bring up two of the three praetorian cohorts in Placentia as replacements. He also made a senior man commander of this force, Flavius Sabinus, the son of the city prefect and nephew of Vespasian (Sabinus was due to take up a consulship on 30 April). But while the troops were delighted by the change of command, Tacitus says, it was the generals’ turn to be angry, at being assigned the leadership of soldiers in a constant state of mutiny. How seriously we should take this remark it is hard to decide. It may be true. But it is the hook on which Tacitus hangs his commentary on the stories of fraternization between the armies, the suspicions that Otho’s generals were trying to exploit the situation for their own ends, and his own conclusion that these tales were rubbish.

  That digression serves also as the entr’acte enabling Tacitus to switch the scene from the south bank of the Po opposite Cremona to Bedriacum on the northern bank. Since he is about to embark on his account of the Othonian army’s last days, he begins with the divisions that continued to plague it after Otho left for Brixellum. Starting at the top and working downward, he draws attention to serious weaknesses at every level. The overall command was vested nominally in Titianus, but real power lay in the hands of Licinius Proculus, the prefect of the guard and parade-ground soldier. Neither listened to Paulinus and Marius Celsus, who tagged along as advisers in name, in fact as scapegoats for any mishaps that occurred. There were similar splits among the junior officers, tribunes, and centurions. The “better element” were angry that the “worst” had greater influence, the “better element” in this context referring probably to the more competent and experienced officers. And the rankers were still full of spirit, but as inclined as ever to criticize their orders rather than to obey them.

  How the Othonians planned to force a battle is a subject on which more ink has been spilt than blood was shed on the field—and Plutarch reports that when he walked the ground years later with his friend Mestrius Florus, the latter pointed out to him a temple against which, just after the battle, Florus had seen corpses piled so high that they touched the gable. It is a truism, of course, that no battle is the neat and tidy affair to which historians reduce it, but over Bedriacum the “fog of war” has never lifted. The one clear, basic point is that to bring on a battle, the Othonians had to carry the fight to the Vitellians. So they needed to move westward from Bedriacum along the river’s northern bank, and approach close enough to Cremona to draw the enemy out of his camp. But this time they could not take all their forces with them, whether or not this was as ill advised as it appears. Some men had to remain at Bedriacum, since it was the staging post for the reinforcements expected from the Balkan provinces. But as the command was entrusted to the injured Annius Gallus, the men left with him were probably those less fit for active duty. This was risky. But the other generals presumably concluded that the Vitellians would not attack the village, so long as their own main force was operating in the area and, for that matter, so long as Otho’s troops at Brixellum remained on the alert.

  Whatever distance the main Othonian force marched on the first day (14 April), it covered enough ground to bring it up onto the Postumian Way, the road leading to Cremona.8 But progress was much slower than it should have been, and Otho was not alone in taking this as a mixture of faintheartedness and incompetence. Even as he sent the generals an angry letter, telling them to carry out his orders, they were beset by complaints from the rankers too. Some demanded that the emperor come up to lead the army; many others urged that the force of gladiators and praetorians under Flavius Sabinus on the southern bank of the Po be summoned to join them. This latter move, incidentally, seems to have been carried out on the next day, but exactly how and when it was done remains obscure. As if this were not enough, Tacitus and Plutarch comment on the lack of expertise with which the generals pitched camp late in the day, asserting that though the landscape was dotted with springs, all of them full at this time of year, the generals picked a site where water was short. Tacitus sums up the situation with the sardonic observation that, in retrospect, it was harder to decide what it would have been best for the Othonians to do than it was to conclude that what they did was the worst thing possible.

  The Vitellians naturally refused to respond on the first day. They would have had to undertake a significantly longer march than the few miles the Othonians managed, and there was no point when Caecina and Valens were resolved to let the enemy make the errors. So the Othonian generals held another conference, on how, when, and where they would fight the battle, and it was probably at the meeting that Otho’s letter was read out and steps taken to ensure that Sabinus brought his force of praetorians and gladiators across the Po to join them. But it also looks as if the lack of a Vitellian response encouraged the Othonian generals in the delusion that the enemy would remain inactive on the next day too. The upshot, according to Tacitus, was a decision that the army would advance to the confluence of the Po and the Adua (or Adda), some five to seven miles beyond Cremona. To make better progress, they would keep to the Postumian Way as long as possible, but arc around Cremona, perhaps as little as four or five miles from the enemy camp. Having reached their destination safely, they would pitch camp, since Tacitus stresses that when they set out on the next morning, they took their baggage train with them, “as if marching off on a campaign rather than to a battle.” Then, after a night resting and recovering their strength, they would offer battle on the following (third) day.

  That this was the absurd plan put into effect on the second morning (15 April) may be confirmed by the nonstop critique to which Paulinus and Celsus subjected it en route. They pointed out repeatedly that when Cremona lay so close to their line of march, not only was an attack inevitable, but the Vitellians would be able also to choose when and where to launch it: they could make their move while the Othonians were in column, encumbered by their baggage train and weary from marching, or after they halted, when the men dispersed to build a camp. Though their advice was prescient for once, it was dismissed with the assertion that they were no longer in command. Titianus and Proculus refused to modify the plan, and they were spurred on by another peremptory dispatch from Otho, rebuking them for their lackadaisical progress. And so, it seems, they blundered into a Vitellian army drawn up and ready to fight.9

  It remains unclear how accurate a reflection of the situation this is for two reasons. First, Tacitus and Plutarch open their accounts in an unusual way. They switch away from the Othonian column, focus on Caecina’s absorption with his pontoon bridge, and then return with him to the battle at a point when the first contacts have been made (however they were made), and Valens has begun forming up the Vitellian battle line. Plutarch has no excuse for this, since he makes nothing of it. Tacitus does, bringing up another mystery. As Caecina was working on his bridge, he was approached by two praetorian tribunes. Where they came from is unknown.10 So too is what they had in mind, whether to befuddle Caecina, to betray their own leaders, or to offer yet another plan. Before they could start their talks, Vitellian scouts rushed up to report that the main Othonian force was about to make contact, and Caecina sent the two tribunes packing while he raced back to Cremona.

  The second reason why it is hard to unravel the situation lies in the stress Tacitus puts on the confusion prevailing amongst the Othonians as they tried to deploy. Supposedly, their column was in total disarray, strung out along the road, and the troop formations were tangled up with baggage carts and sutlers’ wagons. This confusion worsened when they realized that the Vitellians were going to confront them. The deep ditches on both sides of the causeway, not to mention the terrain north of the road which—like that at Ad Castores—was broken up by irrigation and drainage ditches, and impeded by vines trained fr
om tree to tree, made it difficult for the men to fan out. And since the generals were jumpy and the soldiery fed up, clear orders either were not given or were not heard in the uproar. Some troops gathered round their standards, others went looking for theirs. Some shouted as they ran to join their units, others called to comrades who had not joined them. So, says Tacitus, while the braver men pressed forward to take their places in the front ranks, the cowardly lost themselves in the rear. All this may be true, but dwelling on such details tends to obscure two important facts, that the Othonians deployed despite the obstacles they encountered, and that since they were able to deploy, there must have been a time lag between the moment when the two sides became aware of each other’s presence and the moment when they actually joined combat.

  Neither Tacitus nor Plutarch provides the order of battle for the two sides. But so far as we can tell, Caecina and Valens positioned V Alaudae on their left wing (north of the road), I Italica in the center, straddling the causeway, and XXI Rapax on their right wing, south of the road, where the relatively open ground allowed a legion to fight a standard pitched battle. On the extreme right, next to the river, they added a force of Batavian auxiliaries, infantry and cavalry, under Alfenus Varus, since it was here—to all appearances—that the mixture of Othonian gladiators and praetorians from the southern bank took up its position. The rest of their troops Caecina and Valens must have held in reserve, as Tacitus talks of their feeding reinforcements into the battle as and when necessary. Now, there is one interesting point about these dispositions. Valens’ two legions, V Alaudae and I Italica, were given the more difficult assignments, whereas XXI Rapax, the core unit from Caecina’s column, was posted on the open ground south of the road. This may be happenstance, but if Caecina’s men had had to rush back from the pontoon bridge, keeping them on the open ground enabled them to come up and deploy quicker. This may even underlie Plutarch’s rather odd remark that, in the battle, the men of XXI Rapax fought bravely but “were old and past their prime.” Perhaps they were winded.

  Because of the varying nature of the ground, Tacitus and Plutarch (in less detail) describe the battle in a series of vignettes, as if each set-to was a separate encounter. This may be how the battle played out. The first encounter, in any case, was a cavalry skirmish while the Vitellian legions were still forming up. The Vitellian horse sallied forth to do battle with two squadrons of Pannonian and Moesian cavalry at the head of the Othonian column.11 The latter routed them and would have driven them back onto their own lines, had it not been for the steadiness of I Italica. By now up on the causeway, the legionaries drew their swords and forced their own horsemen to rejoin the fray, and this gave the rest of their infantry time to form up without interruption.

  The next contact was also made on the causeway. Here the men of I Italica were faced, apparently, by Otho’s five praetorian cohorts, in all some 2,500 men. According to Tacitus, a disconcerting rumor began to spread through the ranks of the Othonian van that Vitellius’ army had deserted him. As he also says, it is unclear if this report was planted by Vitellian agents to throw the Othonians off guard (this is Suetonius’ view, derived probably from his father, Suetonius Laetus, who fought in the battle), or if it arose within the Othonian lines, by accident or design (this is closer to Plutarch’s opinion). Either way, the praetorians in the front line were so elated that they offered friendly greetings to the Vitellians facing them. This proved doubly unfortunate. It elicited angry murmurs from the enemy, and it created suspicions of treachery among their own comrades in the ranks behind, as yet unaware of the rumor. But once they had recovered from this surprise, the two sides got down to business. Both dispensed with the customary hurling of javelins, because they were so close to one another, and were hemmed in anyway by the precipitous edges to the road. Instead, they fought shield-to-shield, hacking away with swords and axes.12

  Tacitus alone talks of the fighting on the Othonian right wing, on the broken ground north of the road, and he provides only two snippets: that XIII Gemina, the one Balkan legion to have arrived in full force, was driven back by the attack of V Alaudae; and that the advance detachment from XIV Gemina Martia Victrix was surrounded by superior numbers and overwhelmed, though some men managed to fight their way out of the encirclement. By now, Otho’s generals seem to have fled, but Caecina and Valens continued feeding in the reinforcements to guarantee victory. The situation was no better on the Othonian left wing. Here, on the more open ground, the newly recruited I Adiutrix faced the veterans of XXI Rapax. The ex-marines, he declares, were so eager to win renown that they cut down the front ranks of their opponents and captured their eagle. The loss of this emblem being the greatest humiliation a legion could suffer, the Vitellians were infuriated. So once they had rallied, they drove back the Othonians, killed their commander Orfidius Benignus, and took many of their standards—but not their eagle. Even under this onslaught I Adiutrix seems to have attempted a fighting retreat. But they collapsed when taken in flank by the Batavian infantry and cavalry under Alfenus Varus. These latter, having made short work of the band of gladiators and praetorians brought across the river, attacked the legion’s left flank and rolled up its line.

  Although the Othonian center fought long and hard, it gave way once it was stripped of protection on both flanks. A rout followed, but on this neither Tacitus nor Plutarch has much to say, largely because ancient authors cut away from, not to the chase. All over the field Othonians began rushing back to Bedriacum, and for men worsted in battle this was an enormous distance away, between 12 and 20 miles. Some of the fugitives had to cut their way through the enemy (this may be a reference to XIV Gemina), and all were impeded by the piles of corpses. It would be unwise to accept Dio’s assertion that the casualty figures for both sides totaled 40,000, but the slaughter must have run into the thousands. The victors had no incentive to spare their defeated opponents, because Romans taken prisoner in a civil war could not be ransomed or sold into slavery, and Othonian corpses still littered the ground some 40 days later, when Vitellius arrived to view the site of his victory.

  Paulinus and Proculus avoided returning to the camp at Bedriacum, for fear—rightly—that the troops in their rage and frustration would kill them out of hand. This fate nearly befell the blameless commander of XIII Gemina, Vedius Aquila. The moment he entered the camp late in the day, he was surrounded by rankers denouncing him as a deserter and a traitor. That he survived (he was still commander of the legion in the autumn) was due probably to the intervention of Annius Gallus. Left in charge of the camp at Bedriacum, Annius did everything he could to calm the men. Urging them not to give way to despair, he begged them not to make matters worse by turning on one other. Whether they wanted to surrender or to continue the fight, he said, they must come together first.

  Order had been restored by nightfall, when Titianus and Celsus returned. Of Celsus Tacitus says no more, but Plutarch has him call a meeting of officers, in which he urged surrender. If they took the larger view and considered the public good, he supposedly declared, they would recognize that the war was over. As they had suffered such enormous losses, even Otho, “if he was a good man,” would not squander more lives. Recognizing that his cause was lost, he would follow precedent, take the honorable way out, and commit suicide. That Celsus said something seems undeniable. That it bore any resemblance to Plutarch’s speech is improbable. Devoted to Otho’s cause, Celsus would not have made suicide the emperor’s only choice. This is Plutarch’s work, an attempt to limit Otho’s options, and to devalue the decision he took by representing him as a helpless prisoner of convention. To the same end, Plutarch papers over the divisions within the soldiery to whom the officers conveyed Celsus’ words. He claims that the men followed their officers’ advice, whereas Tacitus emphasizes that there was a major split within the soldiery. The praetorians remained violently opposed to surrender and insisted that Otho’s cause was not lost. With this conclusion the Vitellians obviously agreed. Caecina and Valens led their
troops to a point some five miles from Bedriacum and halted there. In part, no doubt, this reflected their inability to storm the camp at once, in part their hope that the enemy would surrender if given time to think. Yet their caution also demonstrated their respect for adversaries who were beaten but not yet broken.

  The Vitellians’ tactics paid off. By the following morning (16 April) even the most bellicose Othonians had decided that they must surrender. While Titianus remained at Bedriacum, Celsus and Gallus set off to negotiate with their opposite numbers. Plutarch paints a vivid picture of the dangers they encountered. They were intercepted by a detachment of Vitellian cavalrymen, who recognized Celsus as the man responsible for their defeat at Ad Castores, and were all for killing him. He was saved only by the intervention of Caecina, who came up and personally escorted the envoys into the camp. Once terms had been agreed, Caecina returned with the Othonians to Bedriacum. Here there had been a change of heart, misgivings prompted perhaps by the length of time the envoys had been gone, perhaps by doubts that an agreement was possible. But Caecina’s taste for theater saved the day. He stretched out his hand in friendship to the camp’s defenders and they laid down their arms and opened the gates.