69 AD: The Year of Four Emperors

by Gwyn Morgan

  This does not mean that Vitellius believed his own claims, though Tacitus seems intent on creating that impression. He summoned aid from Germany, Britain, Spain, and Africa, albeit in a casual manner that veiled the urgency of the situation. Unfortunately for him, the governors and legionary legates in these provinces were just as dilatory about responding. For this Hordeonius Flaccus on the Rhine frontier and Vettius Bolanus in Britain had valid excuses. Both were beset by serious disturbances among the native tribes they were supposed to control. In Hispania Tarraconensis the absence of the governor, Cluvius Rufus, left matters in the hands of the legionary legates of the three units stationed there (VI Victrix, X Gemina, and I Adiutrix), and they procrastinated. Ready to obey so long as Vitellius was successful, says Tacitus, they had no wish to be dragged down with him in adversity. In Africa the situation was different again. The commander of III Augusta was Valerius Festus, somehow a kinsman of the emperor, and he was able to raise additional troops without difficulty. The men who had been formed into military units by Clodius Macer (all disbanded by Galba) took up arms again happily, and the local youth volunteered for service enthusiastically, as they had good memories of Vitellius’ governorship and bad ones of Vespasian’s. The problem was Festus. Initially enthusiastic, he began to waver and wrote secretly to Vespasian.

  Vitellius was able to capture some of the envoys Vespasian sent to Raetia and Gaul, but more got through, thanks to their own craftiness or because they were hidden away by friends. The upshot was that Vitellius’ preparations were much better known to his rival than were the latter’s to him. For a start, Vitellius did not tackle the matter as energetically as he should have done. Then too, the messengers he sent eastward were seized by the pickets the Balkan legions had stationed in the three main passes through the Julian Alps (that is, the passes east of Aquileia). And since, finally, the seasonal Etesian winds were favorable at this stage to sea voyages from west to east, but not vice versa, Vitellius was able to receive no more intelligence by sea than he did by land. Hence it was only after the Balkan legions actually invaded northern Italy before the end of September that dire news coming in from every quarter galvanized him into action. Then he gave orders that Caecina and Valens set out for the north, but since Valens was still recovering from a serious illness, only Caecina could undertake the march.

  Caecina, however, was not happy with his emperor, and the army of which he took command was very different from the one that had been brought to Rome—or so says Tacitus, to introduce a set piece description that contrasts as strongly as possible with his account of their triumphant entry into Rome three months earlier: “The men showed neither physical energy nor mental ardor. The column moved along lethargically and full of gaps. Their horses were spiritless, their arms neglected. The men could not bear the heat, the dust or the weather, and they were as prone to disobey orders as they were reluctant to endure hardship.” Caecina was no better. “There was Caecina’s long-standing tendency to seek popularity, and of late his lethargy. Owing to the excessive indulgence of good fortune he had given way to pleasure-seeking.” So Caecina took no steps to enforce discipline on the column or to get the army into shape.

  Or perhaps he was already contemplating treachery, and destroying the strength of his troops was one of the tricks he was using to achieve his objective. Many believed that by now Caecina’s loyalty had been undermined by advice from Flavius Sabinus, passed to him in secret conversations with Rubrius Gallus. If Caecina were to change sides, so Gallus asserted, Vespasian would meet any terms he set. At the same time Gallus reminded Caecina of his hatred for and jealousy of Valens, and pointed out that since Valens held first place in the Vitellian court, Caecina would do better to seek influence and position with a new emperor.

  This passage raises two sets of problems. The first set involves the expeditionary force itself. It may have been in terrible condition when it left Rome, and even if it was not, any moralist would have claimed that it should have been, because wrecked by its time in the city (hence the contrast Tacitus draws). But it was never Caecina’s intention to wreck it, nor did he. As he would have known from his trek to Rome earlier in the year, and as Tacitus too seems to have recognized, a route march would whip the men back into shape. But Dio and Josephus assert that it was because Caecina’s troops were still in terrible shape when he reached his destination that the sight of the better disciplined and more combat ready Flavian troops persuaded him to open negotiations, with a view to switching sides. If it is legitimate to suggest that Dio and Josephus are repeating claims made by Caecina after the event, claims similar to those he had voiced after Ad Castores, when he blamed his failure on the inadequacies of his troops, we can conclude that the poor condition of his army was a mere pretext.

  The advantage of this view is that it allows us to see Caecina’s aim as being to face the enemy with an army that was combat ready, a valuable bargaining chip if he could negotiate with them, and a fail-safe if he could not. This accords well with another aspect of the situation. Caecina was entrusted with every last legionary and auxiliary soldier the Vitellians could muster (less those siphoned off into the praetorian and urban cohorts). So he controlled the men he had led south from Vindonissa (XXI Rapax, plus the detachments from IV Macedonica and XXII Primigenia), the troops Valens had marched through Gaul (the bulk of V Alaudae, along with detachments from I Germanica, XV Primigenia, and XVI), the legion picked up at Lugdunum (I Italica), and the men Vitellius had brought with him to Italy (the balance of XXII Primigenia, together with the detachments from the three British legions, II Augusta, IX Hispana, and XX Valeria Victrix). Now, at some point after Caecina left Rome, Valens wrote a letter to the troops he had commanded, and urged them to wait for him en route, claiming (truly or falsely we cannot tell) that this was the arrangement he had made with Caecina. But the latter “pretended” that the plan had been changed, that they must face the enemy with all their forces, and that they should keep marching north as fast as possible. And “as he was there in person, it was his lead that the troops followed.” If Caecina’s aim was to betray Vitellius, in other words, he meant to do so comprehensively, and to hand over to the enemy every soldier he could. And if he had to give battle, he had an army that could win the victory and the glory that went with it.

  Now the second set of problems, the matter of Caecina’s loyalty and the stories told about that. He had reason to be unhappy. When the praetorian and urban cohorts had been reformed, Tacitus reports, Caecina had been humiliated by his inability to get his way, and this blow to his vanity “is believed to have been the first thing that caused Caecina’s loyalty to Vitellius to waver.” Still, to judge by Caecina’s behavior, he seems only to have played with the idea of changing sides until late in his trek north. He split his expeditionary force in two. The smaller group, composed of the full legions I Italica and XXI Rapax with “part of the cavalry,” he sent to Cremona. Command of this group was vested presumably in the two legionary legates (whoever they may have been), but as little was expected of them, it cannot have mattered much. While Cremona had been the Vitellians’ HQ in their campaign against Otho, and was an excellent base from which to block any enemy advance southward into Italy, it was best suited to deal with a force emerging from the western end of the Alps. What needed countering now was an offensive launched from their eastern end. So Caecina took personal command of the larger, more heterogeneous group and led that to Hostilia (Ostiglia), 50 or more miles further east. Although a mere village attached for administrative purposes to Verona, Hostilia commanded the road that ran south from there to Mutina; it lay on a road running westward to Bedriacum and Cremona; and it shielded Ravenna, the port for the squadron of the imperial fleet second only to that based at Misenum. An enemy advancing through the gap between Cremona and the east coast had to confront troops positioned there.

  In the final stage of the march, however, Caecina decided to let the troops go on ahead while he turned aside and made for Ravenna, “
under the pretext” of addressing the members of the fleet. If we look at this positively, we can say that Caecina had to ensure that the fleet in his rear was not disloyal or hostile. The marines at Ravenna could have taken the field, just as the marines from Misenum had during the war with Otho. As Tacitus says (though he phrases it differently), the members of this fleet made up the only organized force in northern Italy that had ever sworn allegiance to Otho, and as he reports later, many had been recruited from Dalmatia and Pannonia, provinces that by now had declared for Vespasian. Again, Caecina may well have suspected not just that their commander, Lucilius Bassus, resented Vitellius’ failing to make him prefect of the praetorians, but also that he “was intent now on taking revenge for his unjustifiable anger.” But all these were reasons also for Caecina to ponder treachery. As Tacitus observes, “it became clear later that Caecina’s aim was a secret meeting with Bassus to fix the details of a plan to switch sides.” Either way, Caecina can have made his decision to defect only after he had met with Bassus.

  Tacitus refuses to say who corrupted whom: “it is impossible to determine whether Bassus persuaded Caecina to change sides, or if the same evil impulse inspired both of them. When you put villains together, they try to top each other’s villainy.” Tacitus probably lacked hard evidence on the point, and he may not have cared. For this is also a maneuver to lump the two men together, so that they can be denounced with equal vigor. In Vespasian’s reign, so Tacitus asserts, writers credited these two with acting out of “concern for peace and love of the state,” but their motives were the exact opposite. “They were both by nature fickle and, having betrayed Galba without a qualm, they seem clearly to have acted out of rivalry and jealousy in betraying Vitellius because he favored others over them. Hence Caecina hurried after his army and began undermining by various methods the loyalty of his centurions and soldiers, Bassus that of the fleet.” So ends Tacitus’ account of the Vitellians’ preparations to meet the incursion by the Balkan legions that would set Vespasian on the throne before the end of the year.

  8

  The Beginning of the End: Vespasian through August 69

  To understand the campaign by the Balkan legions that unseated Vitellius in late December 69, we must deal first with the man in whose name—if not always with whose blessing—they undertook their offensive. Discontented as these legions were, apparently from the moment Otho committed suicide in mid-April, they had no cause to embrace until Vespasian was proclaimed emperor and invited them to take up arms in his behalf. It was as well that they did so. For of the four men who became emperors in 68/69, Vespasian must have seemed to contemporaries as well as to posterity the one whose bid for power was the least likely to succeed, by reason of his birth, his age, and his career to date. Hence Tacitus’ frequent references to “the luck of the Flavians,” the many stories Suetonius retails of signs portending Vespasian’s elevation to the throne, and—for that matter—his insistence that Vespasian and his two sons, Titus and Domitian, believed or came to believe firmly in the workings of Fate.

  To reconstruct Vespasian’s activities we must rely on a relatively brief life by Suetonius, a comprehensive if eulogistic account of his campaigns in Judaea by Josephus, stray details from what remains of Dio’s history, and above all, the information Tacitus chooses to provide. As usual, Tacitus is the most important of our sources, but—also as usual—he provides the information in ways that suit his purposes much better than they do ours. The bulk of the material he serves up in three segments, each set at more or less the appropriate chronological point in his overall account, the first in the survey of the empire’s situation in January 69; the second where Otho and Vitellius have been brought on stage and the possibility of Vespasian’s taking a hand in the game is raised; and the third where Vitellius has not yet reached Rome, but has already given what Tacitus presents as clear evidence that he is unfit to rule. In none of these segments, however, does Tacitus favor the emperor who gave him his own start in public life. Though he declares Vespasian the first man to be improved by becoming emperor, a relative judgment anyway, one of his aims throughout is to debunk the idea that Vespasian had undertaken his revolt to save the empire from Vitellius. Though the new emperor fostered this claim assiduously, chronology alone—as Tacitus recognized—proved that it was never more than a pretext.

  The most notable feature of Vespasian’s early career, and of his family as a whole, was its lack of distinction. Suetonius apologizes for this in his very first paragraph, maintaining that this obscurity was nothing of which Rome needed to be ashamed when Vespasian’s own achievements compensated so fully for it. Yet the need to apologize shows how reluctant Romans still were to embrace the idea that ability could be found in a man without a pedigree. The first member of the family to make anything of himself, says Suetonius, was Titus Flavius Petro, Vespasian’s paternal grandfather. He came from Reate (Rieti), a small village in Sabine territory (central Italy). Petro fought as a centurion or an evocatus (a time-expired veteran recalled to the standards) at Pharsalus in 48 B.C. Though he had backed Pompey and the republicans, he managed to win honorable discharge and a pardon from Caesar, and this convinced him that profiting by civil wars was safer than participating in them. So Petro became a debt collector, and since indebtedness remained a major problem until Augustus ended the civil wars, Petro must have amassed a tidy fortune. But in aristocratic eyes this was nothing to be proud of: gentlemen might need ready money constantly, but they would not stoop to handling “filthy lucre.”

  Petro married a woman named Tertulla, who in later days at least owned a suburban estate near Cosa on the coast of Etruria. The pair had one son, the first member of the family to bear the name Titus Flavius Sabinus, and he followed in his father’s footsteps. There were stories that he held the rank of centurion in the military (Suetonius denies them), and he certainly became a money lender or banker. Early on he collected the duties levied on goods entering or leaving the province Asia, so scrupulously—says Suetonius—that cities there erected statues to him with the oxymoronic inscription “to an honest tax-farmer.” Later, Sabinus plied his trade among the Helvetii in Switzerland, taking advantage probably of the growing wealth of the Gallic provinces, and there he died in Claudius’ reign, perhaps at Aventicum (Avenches), the town forced to surrender unconditionally to Caecina early in 69.

  Sabinus married up. His wife Vespasia Polla came from an “honorable family” from Nursia (Norcia). Her father had risen to prefect of the camp, while her brother became a senator of middling rank. The couple had three children, a daughter who died in her first year, and two boys. For them the prospects were bright, as the family now possessed the wealth and standing to underwrite senatorial careers for both. Vespasian (Titus Flavius Vespasianus), the younger son, was born on 7 November 9 A.D. The elder boy was Titus Flavius Sabinus, born sometime between 3 and 8. He has already figured in our story as the man who was installed as prefect of the city by Otho after Galba’s murder, and who put up only weak resistance when Vitellius’ sister-in-law Triaria forced the execution of Galba’s kinsman Cornelius Dolabella. But this was the key to Sabinus’ success, assiduous and unquestioning loyalty to one emperor after another. Some called him passive, says Tacitus, but others preferred to think him a moderate. Sabinus must have started his career under Tiberius, since Tacitus states that he spent 35 years in public service, but all we know for certain is that he held a consulship around 45, was governor of Moesia for 7 years (perhaps between 49 and 56), and for 12 served as prefect of the city. This last post he occupied for two terms under Nero, the first between 56 and 60 so far as we can tell, and the second from 62 to 68. Galba then replaced him with Ducenius Geminus, but his reinstatement was accepted by Otho in January 69 and confirmed by Vitellius in June. The identity of Sabinus’ wife is unknown, but his like-named son was designated consul for May and June 69 and took command of the Othonian forces previously led by the unfortunate Martius Macer, and his daughter married into an established
consular family.

  Tacitus gives Sabinus only faint praise, declaring him a man of integrity and justice, though he talked too much. But he concedes that “what everybody would agree is that until Vespasian became emperor, the dignity of the house depended on Sabinus.”1 He also credits the stories that Sabinus was not on good terms with his younger brother. Although some prefer to sweep these tales under the rug, Vespasian was not a younger brother of whom a Sabinus could be proud. His career prior to 69 resembled a country cousin’s progress, an impression heightened by the rustic accent and the delight in coarse jokes he retained to the end of his life. Initially, we are told, he was not even sure that he wanted to become a senator, and it took his mother’s taunting to drive him to follow his brother’s example. Then, as he made his way up the ladder of offices, he became aedile under Caligula, but—Suetonius and Dio tell us—failed so badly in his duty to ensure that the streets of Rome were kept clean that the emperor stuffed handfuls of muck down his toga. He fared better under Claudius, at first anyway, as the legate of legion II Augusta in the conquest of southwestern Britain between 43 and 47. This won him not only triumphal ornaments and a consulship for the last two months of 51, but also a reputation that would stand him in good stead with the legion 20 years later. Yet after his consulship, Vespasian withdrew from public life, probably as a result of Claudius’ deciding to marry his niece Agrippina in 49. Like Galba, Vespasian had incurred her enmity, originally by supporting Caligula’s charges that she had been involved in the conspiracy of Lentulus Gaetulicus. Agrippina was ever ready to take revenge on those who had crossed her, justifiably or not.