by Gwyn Morgan
At the end of the parade Vitellius climbed the Capitol to sacrifice to Jupiter Best and Greatest, and there too he hailed his mother “Augusta.” That evening he attended the lavish cena adventicia thrown for him by his brother, and on the next morning he set about winning over the senate and people. He had prepared a grandiloquent speech full of self-praise, says Tacitus, but it did not go down well with the assembled senators, aware as they were of the failings the emperor and his army had displayed so far. The common people, on the other hand, greeted Vitellius with shouts of approval. Tacitus, predictably, attributes this to their disregard for important issues, their inability to distinguish between truth and lies, and their being thoroughly versed in the flattery expected on such occasions. But they had other reasons too. Caring more about the present than the past, they wanted some sign of a return to normal conditions, and that is no doubt why they pressured the emperor now to assume the title “Augustus.”
On what remained of the peaceful segment of Vitellius’ reign, the period between his arrival in Rome and the departure of his army for the north in mid- to late September, Suetonius has little of value to say; Dio records evil omens, including a comet, the moon’s undergoing two eclipses, and the people’s seeing two suns in the sky at the same time; and Tacitus reports a string of incidents, only two of which can be dated, one at the start of the period and one at its end. The former involved another blunder. As the newly installed Pontifex Maximus, head of the official state religion, the emperor was supposed to know which days in the official calendar were appropriate for public business and which were not. On 18 July, nonetheless, the anniversary of two massive Roman defeats in the dim and distant past, and so one of the darkest days in the entire year, he published an edict. The sources do not point out that even a century earlier few aristocrats knew their calendar well. Instead, Tacitus and Suetonius use this as yet another stick with which to belabor Vitellius. So, says Tacitus, in a community inclined to put interpretations on every event, this was taken as a dire sign, but the historian himself declares it proof that Vitellius was ignorant of all law, human and divine, and since his freedmen and his friends showed much the same indifference, the emperor “conducted himself as if in the midst of a world of drunkards.”
The only hard information we have on why Vitellius published the edict now is Tacitus’ unhelpful comment that it concerned “the conduct of religious ceremonies.” What it may have announced, however, was his plan to honor Nero’s memory. Tacitus, admittedly, reports this incident much later in his narrative, in a catalogue of Vitellius’ grossest excesses, but it may be wiser to follow Suetonius and Dio, both of whom make it an early, programmatic step, in the former’s words, “to leave no doubt about what model Vitellius intended following in governing the state.” In any event, Vitellius gave orders that an altar be built in the middle of the Campus Martius, and sacrifices made to Nero’s shades by the Augustales, a priesthood founded by Romulus and reformed by Tiberius to honor the imperial family. Thus—it is implied—was an antique priesthood with a noble purpose reduced to honoring the worst of the Julio-Claudians at the behest of the worst of his successors. According to Tacitus, this “delighted the basest elements in the population and disgusted all right-thinking citizens.”
Vitellius had some success in appeasing the “right-minded” in the electoral ceremonies (they can hardly be called elections), which ratified arrangements made during the trek south in the matter of men to be designated consuls for the remainder of the year. Under the new dispensation, Marius Celsus and Arrius Antoninus would hold office for July and August (that is, for a term a month shorter than Otho had allotted to them), Caecina and Valens would be rewarded with a term occupying September and October, and Gnaeus Caecilius Simplex would be partnered with Gaius Quinctius Atticus, one of Otho’s choices, for November and December.8 Suetonius regards this as more proof of Vitellius’ disregard for the laws, partly because he runs it together with Vitellius’ designating consuls for the next ten years, an act Tacitus rightly sets in the emperor’s last, desperate days, partly because he asserts that Vitellius “made himself consul in perpetuity,” an action Tacitus does not mention.9 In reality, these arrangements created a compromise between the claims of men supported by previous rulers and those of the men Vitellius had to reward.
Also to humor the senators, the emperor attended meetings and acted as one of them, even when trivial matters were discussed. But one result was a confrontation with that prickly champion of “free speech,” Helvidius Priscus. Helvidius seems to have proposed a motion contrary to Vitellius’ wishes. It is unclear how the situation played out. Dio reports the exchange in neutral terms, but Tacitus insists that Vitellius was angered at first and then calmed down, passed off the incident as a dispute between two senators, and commented that he had had disagreements with Helvidius’ father-in-law Thrasea too. The realists in the audience, says Tacitus, were staggered by the effrontery with which Nero’s minion set himself on the same level as Thrasea. But the optimists were taken in, imagining that Vitellius had picked on Thrasea rather than one of the powerbrokers in the senate, because he favored the free expression of opinion over the backroom arm twisting of the influential.
With the people Vitellius followed a different tack. They had played no real part in the elections since Caligula’s time. (If there was a choice, senators made it.) At best the people might be summoned to the Campus Martius to hear a formal announcement of the results, and so they had shown little interest in the doings of senators for years. In fact, the evidence suggests that they perked up only when a senator fell from grace, this delighting them as much as did the downfall of an imperial favorite. To gratify them, Vitellius made sure to attend the shows and, more important still, to take a keen interest in everything that went on in the theater, the amphitheater, or—his favorite—the circus where the chariot races were held. (Julius Caesar had angered the people by doing his paperwork during the shows.) But since Vitellius in his younger days had been so enthusiastic a supporter of the Blues, one of the four racing stables, that he had even gone to the circus wearing their uniform and had helped rub down the horses, there were those—senators no doubt—who looked askance. While Tacitus concedes that these were “actions that would have won him favor and popularity, if prompted by honorable motives,” he adds that those who remembered the emperor’s youthful indiscretions found his conduct “inappropriate and cheap.” This is not criticism for its own sake, incidentally. Suetonius declares that Vespasian’s son Titus excelled at blending chumminess with dignity.
Where the armed forces in Rome were concerned, Vitellius had less input than his two henchmen. He countenanced the appointment of Publilius Sabinus and Julius Priscus as the new prefects of the praetorian guard, even though both were low-ranking officers. (Sabinus had commanded only a cavalry squadron, while Priscus was a legionary centurion.) The selection was made by Caecina and Valens, each of whom wanted one of his own adherents in charge. Sabinus being Caecina’s creature and Priscus Valens’, these two transmitted their masters’ feuding down the chain of command. More importantly, their appointment dashed the hopes of Sextus Lucilius Bassus. The emperor had made him commander of the two main fleets, that at Misenum and that at Ravenna, an extraordinary measure and—perhaps—a tribute to his efficiency. But Bassus had wanted to be prefect of the guard So, out of vanity and anger, he supposedly began plotting to betray Vitellius as soon as he had the chance.
This is Tacitus’ first salvo in a sustained onslaught designed to demonstrate that Vitellius and his lieutenants between them managed in every conceivable way to destroy the victorious army they had brought to Rome, and so helped cause their own destruction. Hence he turns next to the billeting of the troops from one end of Rome to the other. Though he fails to admit that this was more or less unavoidable in the circumstances, he points out rightly that it broke down not only the troops’ organization and unit cohesion, since the men could not be assembled and drilled, but their disci
pline and morale too, since they spent their time slacking and fornicating. Then there was negligence. A large number of Gallic and German auxiliaries (or perhaps tribal contingents) were quartered in the circus located in the Vatican area, one of the least healthy in Rome. Whether they were given the worst billet because they were judged the least important elements in the army or the ones least likely to complain, the tribesmen’s inability to stand the heat and their resulting eagerness to take to the waters of the nearby Tiber led reportedly to serious illnesses and many deaths.
With the men thus demoralized, Tacitus brings up Vitellius’ plan—or it may have been the work of Caecina and Valens—to recruit 16 new cohorts of praetorian guard and four of urban cohorts, each to be 1,000 men strong. The decision was not as capricious as Tacitus’ account implies. The Othonian cohorts of the guard had been disbanded, and we have no clue to what happened to the members of the urban cohorts assigned to Otho’s maritime expedition. Some may have made their way back to Rome, by land or by sea, as individuals or in groups, but it is also possible that many of the men were still marooned in and around Albingaunum (Albenga) in Liguria, the site they had occupied when the expedition petered out. Whatever the case, the Vitellians’ reason for making the change was manifestly to create units unswervingly loyal to their emperor. But to achieve this end, they had to draw recruits from the forces already under their command, and there lay the rub.
First, the praetorian and the urban cohorts were élite units: a praetorian ranker was paid 750 denarii (3,000 sesterces) a year before stoppages and served for 16 years, and an urban ranker received 375 denarii (HS 1,500) a year and served for 20 years. By contrast, an ordinary legionary was paid only 225 denarii (HS 900) a year and served for a minimum of 20 years, while an auxiliary who already possessed Roman citizenship seems to have been entitled to a similar sum, though he had to serve for 25 years.10 Hence much more cash had to be found to pay these new cohorts. Second, and perhaps more important, we know that while legionaries or even auxiliaries could be promoted into praetorian or urban cohorts for meritorious service, the bulk of the men were drawn exclusively from citizens resident in Italy, a restriction that was not applied to legionaries and auxiliaries. So the Vitellian plan struck down one of the main distinctions between élite units and the regular armed forces, and was greeted by traditionalists with shock and horror. In Tacitus’ words, “the distinction of serving in the units stationed in Rome was shattered.”11
Obviously, any legionary or auxiliary ought to have been delighted to secure promotion into the city units, but now another problem surfaced. At first, so Tacitus seems to say, Vitellius left his two lieutenants to take care of the details, and Valens’ followers benefited much more than did Caecina’s. Valens had managed to recover his standing with the troops, by claiming not only to have rescued Caecina from the jaws of defeat after Ad Castores, but also to have played the leading role at Bedriacum. And since he was much better at intrigue, his men or—more likely—his officers secured the plum assignments. Then, perhaps to limit the bickering, Vitellius himself announced that any ranker who wanted to apply for service in the city units could do so, no matter what his record. Tacitus allows that some good men opted to remain in the legions and the auxiliaries, by choice or because they were fed up with the diseases they were catching and the changeability of Rome’s climate. But he insists that “the legions and cavalry lost the pick of their men,” and he seems to have believed (wrongly) that this affected the fighting quality of the troops who would shortly face the Flavian incursion into Italy. But he is right to claim that their numbers were reduced. On his calculations, one-third of the 60,000 men Vitellius had brought to Rome were siphoned off into the new cohorts, and they were “not so much selected as drafted at random.”
How Vitellius, Caecina, and Valens imagined that they would pay for these steps is unclear, but here too they seemingly followed a hand-to-mouth policy. Tacitus has little to say, and that little is usually attached to something else. So, for instance, he ties one example to his account of the feuding between Caecina and Valens. As he tells the story, these two were feuding openly now that the fighting was done. Encouraged by their friends and adherents, they ran the state in a hothouse atmosphere. “They competed with one another and invited comparison in the numbers who courted their favour, attended them when they went out, and crowded their morning levees.” Besides, they seized town houses, suburban estates, and the wealth of the empire, while “a plaintive and poverty-stricken mass of aristocrats,” restored from exile by Galba, received no consideration from the emperor. Actually, Vitellius off-loaded the problem. He reimposed on the freedmen of the former exiles the requirement that they help their erstwhile masters out of their difficulties, a measure—says Tacitus—that won plaudits from leading men and common people alike. But the freedmen evaded their duty through “slavish ingenuity.” Either they hid their funds with men too obscure to be noticed or too powerful to be challenged. Or they entered the imperial household, and so made themselves not just untouchable by anybody save Vitellius, but more influential than their former masters.
It was presumably to counter this, and to raise funds for himself too, that Vitellius decided to impose an extraordinary property tax on imperial freedmen, both the ex-slaves he had inherited from his predecessors, and those he had acquired willy-nilly when they transferred into the imperial household to avoid the earlier decree. Tacitus does not point out that Vitellius was being consistent, by forcing his freedmen to support their patron, or that this measure must have won him immense popularity with everybody else. As he remarks in another passage, it took the emperor’s freedman Asiaticus only three months to become as hated for his avarice as had been all Nero’s freedmen put together. But what complicates the situation is, first, that Tacitus reports this later decree as if it were the result of Vitellius’ awareness that he lacked the cash to pay his troops a donative; and second, that he seems to imply that Vitellius imagined just passing the decree would solve the problem. He asserts that the emperor meanwhile thought only of extravagance, building stables for the horses used in the chariot races, filling the circus with gladiatorial bouts and animal shows, and “playing the fool with his money as if it would never run out.”
This reference to a donative is usually taken at face value, but it is more likely a misunderstanding. By Tacitus’ day donatives were a part of the system, handed out to the soldiery as a matter of course by each emperor in turn. There is simply not enough evidence to support the assumption that this was the rule in Vitellius’ day too. Otho, after all, had paid no donative until the praetorian mutiny forced his hand two months after his accession. And not even Tacitus asserts that the Vitellian soldiery actually pressured their emperor to cough up the money. In fact, if they had looted their way down Italy, as Tacitus has claimed, they should have had ample supplies of cash already, and have been satisfied with their future pay prospects as a result of the measures taken to let all comers enroll in the praetorian and urban cohorts. It may be best to hold that Vitellius never even considered paying a donative.
For the rest, Vitellius had always been a spendthrift, and he did not change now. Hence Tacitus’ comment that “in Vitellius’ court nobody got ahead by showing honesty or application. There was but one route to power, satisfying Vitellius’ limitless appetites with monstrous banquets and extravagant gastronomy. The emperor thought it quite enough if he could enjoy what he had already, taking no thought for the longer term, and in just a few months—so it is believed—he consumed some 900 million sesterces. Truly, it shows Rome’s greatness, and her misfortune, that she survived an Otho and a Vitellius within a single year, and suffered humiliation of various kinds at the hands of a Vinius and a Fabius, an Icelus and an Asiaticus.”
Although Tacitus is careful to declare the charge that Vitellius frittered away 900 million sesterces a rumor, some scholars positively gobble with indignation that he even mentions it. Yet they can offer no valid reason why the histori
an should have omitted a widespread perception of the emperor. Nor can they claim that Vitellius would have been unable—in theory or practice—to squander so much money in a few months. According to Suetonius, Caligula got through three times this amount in less than a year, while Vespasian declared early in his reign that he needed a staggering 40,000 million sesterces to put the empire back on its feet.12 So if a sum like 900 million sesterces was available, Vitellius could have run through it without difficulty. If we must cavil, the question to ask is whether this sum was actually available, especially when Tacitus has said so little about the emperor’s fund-raising efforts. The simplest solution may be to contend that Vitellius was able as emperor to run up bills on a scale even grander than Otho had managed when he was heir presumptive, whether or not he incurred these debts for purposes as frivolous as Tacitus would have us believe.
As for Tacitus’ statement that under Vitellius nobody could get ahead on the basis of honesty and effort, this is designed to help explain the speed with which he fell from power. It was not by military prowess alone that his opponents overthrew him within four months. The first sign of the trouble to come reached Rome in September, perhaps around the same time as the one other incident Tacitus gives us enough information to date securely, his report that Caecina and Valens celebrated the emperor’s birthday with gladiatorial shows, held on a scale without precedent or parallel in every single ward into which Rome was divided.13 What arrived was a dispatch from Marcus Aponius Saturninus, the governor of Moesia, reporting that legion III Gallica had defected to Vespasian. As Saturninus followed the legion’s example almost at once, and so provided no more details, the emperor’s courtiers—like Galba’s in January—were able to put an optimistic spin on the report. Only one legion had mutinied, they asserted, and there was nothing to worry about when all the other troops were loyal. Whether or not additional information came in later from other sources, Vitellius took the same line in an address to his troops. He put the blame on Otho’s praetorians. Criticizing them for spreading baseless rumors, and suppressing any reference to Vespasian, he asserted repeatedly that there was no threat of civil war. But as he stationed troops around the city to break up groups of gossipers, says Tacitus, he caused more rumor mongering.
