by Gwyn Morgan
Tacitus refuses to endorse any of these possibilities. Instead, he observes that “it is difficult to lay on any one individual the blame that attached to all.” This he substantiates with three points. First, Mucianus kept trying to delay the army with his equivocal letters. Second, Antonius deserved censure, be it for his untimely decision to humor Mucianus or for claiming this as his motive in order to shift the opprobrium onto his rival. And third, all the other generals behaved as if the war was over and turned what should have been a glorious end to their campaign into a disaster. Even the impetuous Petillius Cerialis dawdled, although he was sent on ahead with 1,000 cavalry to make his way across country and reconnoiter the possibilities for entering Rome unopposed by the Salarian Way in the northeastern corner of the city. As a result, it was only the messages from Sabinus that spurred the Flavians into action.
Once they heard that the Capitol was under siege, Antonius marched the rest of his forces down the Flaminian Way at top speed. But as they had 44 miles to cover, they were able to reach only Saxa Rubra (Prima Porta), 9 miles short of their mark, when they learnt that the Capitol had been fired and Sabinus killed. This was not the only bad news. The common people and the slaves, they were told, were being armed to fight for Vitellius. And Petillius Cerialis’ cavalry had suffered defeat earlier in the day. Anticipating no opposition as they moved down the Salarian Way, they had run into a force of foot and horse on ground short of the city. The area was a jumble of buildings, gardens, and narrow lanes better known to the Vitellians than to the attackers. Besides, Cerialis’ force included cavalrymen recruited from the Vitellians who had surrendered at Narnia. As a result, his men were routed, and the one thing that saved them was the Vitellians’ breaking off the pursuit at Fidenae, 6 miles north of the city.
Though minor, this setback had a disproportionate effect on the morale of the common people in Rome. A few had the proper weaponry, the rest grabbed whatever they could find, and all demanded the signal to march forth to battle. So Vitellius sent them on their way on the morning of 20 December and then, being less sanguine about the likely outcome of their efforts, he called a senate meeting. This picked envoys to approach the enemy forces and urge a peaceful settlement. None of the envoys was treated with due respect, but their reception varied. Not surprisingly, those who went to Petillius Cerialis were handled very roughly. His men not only rejected a settlement out of hand, but also wounded the leader of the delegation, the praetor Arulenus Rusticus. This, says Tacitus, violated not only his status as a magistrate and an envoy, but also “the regard in which he was held as a man.” Still, Rusticus was a stiff-necked defender of the senate’s rights, selected for this mission probably because he was a partisan of neither Vitellius nor Vespasian. The lictor (attendant) standing next to him was killed when he dared to sweep the crowd aside, and the rest of Rusticus’ companions were scattered. At this point, not before time, Cerialis intervened and gave the envoys safe conduct out. Tacitus has perhaps some justification for huffing and puffing that the immunity granted to envoys “even by barbarians” was almost violated outside the walls of Rome itself, so strong a hold had “the frenzy of civil strife” taken on the participants.
The envoys who made their way to Antonius were received more calmly, “not because his troops were better disciplined, but because they had more respect for their commander.” Whether or not this qualifies as a distinction without a difference, a busybody had grafted himself onto this embassy, Musonius Rufus. A knight and a doctrinaire Stoic (his admirers still call him “the Roman Socrates”), he mingled with the troops and lectured armed men on the blessings of peace and the evils of war. Many thought him a joke, more a bore, but a few wanted to beat him up. They dropped this idea, however, when he abandoned his untimely philosophizing, “heeding the advice of the best behaved and the threats leveled by others.” It may also have helped that these envoys were accompanied by the Vestal Virgins. Called upon to act as intermediaries in times of major crisis, they brought a letter from Vitellius to Antonius, asking that he consider a cease-fire for 24 hours. That way, the emperor said, everything could be arranged more easily. The Vestals were dismissed with respect, Vitellius’ request was not. The answer given him was that the slaughter of Sabinus and the burning of the Capitol had made negotiations impossible.
Despite his firm answer to the envoys, Antonius called an assembly of his troops and argued that their best plan would be to encamp near the Milvian Bridge just outside the city boundary, and to enter Rome the following day (21 December). He reasoned that the troops were so exasperated that, if they were not given time to calm down, they would do grievous bodily harm to the senate and people, and plunder and burn down the temples and shrines of the gods. But the troops were suspicious that delay would get in the way of their victory, and they had already caught sight of the sun glinting on the standards behind which the common people were advancing. Since this created the impression that an enemy army was about to attack, Antonius was left with no choice but to prepare for battle at once.
He split his troops into three columns, forcing the Vitellians to do the like. The main body continued down the Flaminian Way and across the Milvian Bridge, dispersing the Vitellian “people’s army” with a cavalry charge, perhaps at the bridge. Then they ran into the Vitellian column sent to oppose them, but Tacitus gives no details on this, remarking only that as a rule the Vitellians were out-generaled by the Flavians. Antonius’ second column made off to the left (west) of the Flaminian Way, and advanced along the bank of the Tiber until it reached the Aurelian Gate. This gave them access to the Campus Martius in the northwest, and here the fighting was heavier, since the Vitellians made one desperate charge after another, and even when they were dislodged from this open ground, they rallied within the city. Antonius’ third column took the heaviest casualties. This trekked eastward to the road Cerialis had followed, the Salarian Way, and advanced as far as the Colline Gate on the northeastern side of the city. This area was much more countrified. So the roads were narrow and slick, the Vitellians were able to take up position on top of garden walls, and they held back the attackers with showers of rocks and javelins. Only late in the day were they driven back, after being taken in the rear by a cavalry charge. Even then the surviving Vitellian praetorians from all three columns fell back to their fortified camp on the northeastern corner of the city.
Before Tacitus goes into the details on that, however, he indulges in another burst of rhetorical, even disingenuous, indignation. The common people, he asserts, watched the two sides as they fought their way through the city, and just as if they were at a gladiatorial show, they cheered and applauded first this side, then that, depending on who was winning. And when the defeated hid in shops or took refuge in houses, they demanded that they be dragged out and their throats cut. Then, while the soldiery were intent on slaughtering one another, the people appropriated the greater part of the plunder (this is the only aspect of the situation Dio mentions). Yet it was no more unusual in Roman times than it was in later ages for civilians to gather and watch a battle, though it may have been rare for the spectators to keep their vantage points when the fighting was so close. In any case, this is Tacitus’ excuse for enlarging the size of the frame. Savage and grotesque scenes were to be witnessed all over the city, he avers. At one point there were battles and casualties, at another the taverns and baths were doing a roaring trade; at one point, the streets were covered with blood and corpses, at another they were the haunts of “prostitutes and their male counterparts.” There were all the vices of a long and affluent peace, and all the outrages committed in taking a town. “In short, you would have thought that this one city was simultaneously maddened by war and drunk with pleasure.”
The vividness of this description has induced some to believe that Tacitus witnessed these events. In fact, he is engaging in rhetorical trickery. As the fighting was limited by and large to the northern part of the city, there was no reason why life should not pursue its normal
course in the regions untouched by the fighting. Without radio and television to inform them, many inhabitants may not have known or cared what was going on elsewhere, or have believed the reports they heard. And it was the Saturnalia, after all. This does not deter our author. As he puts it, there had been civil war battles in Rome before, three of them during the 80s B.C., and there had been no less cruelty then. But then “there had not been the unnatural indifference of a populace that abandoned its enjoyment not even for a second, as if civil war were one more amusement added to the festivities.” Still, his posturing has a point. Belaboring the people’s indifference creates the strongest possible contrast with the ferocity the two sides showed in the storming of the praetorian camp, and the high rhetoric devoted to the populace’s diversions allows for similar flights to describe this final battle.
The fighting was intense. The fiercest of the Vitellians regarded holding the camp as their last hope, and that made the Flavians—especially Otho’s one-time praetorians—still more determined to capture it. Using every means employed to take the strongest cities, siege-sheds, artillery, ramps, and firebrands, the attackers encouraged one other by shouting that capturing the camp would cap all the hard work and all the danger they had undergone. In an interesting mix of the inspirational and the practical, they supposedly told each other that they had restored the city to the senate and people of Rome, and the temples to the gods (thus carrying out Antonius’ wishes). The camp was the soldier’s crowning glory: this was his country, this his home. And if they failed to take it in the first assault, they would have to spend the night under arms. The Vitellians, on the other hand, were much inferior in numbers and luck, but they did all they could to mar the victory, delay the peace, and defile the barracks with blood and gore. Many fell fatally wounded in the turrets or breathed their last on the battlements of the camp. “When the attackers tore down the gates, the defenders still massed in the entryway and fought on, every one of them falling with his wounds in front and his face turned to the enemy. Even as they died, they were determined that their deaths be glorious.”
Once the city had been taken (but before the camp was stormed), Vitellius slipped out of the back of the palace, and set off in a litter for the family’s house on the Aventine (accompanied only by his baker and his cook, Suetonius tells us). He planned to stay hidden there until nightfall, and then to find refuge with his brother and the praetorian cohorts at Tarracina. But he changed his mind, seemingly almost at once, and—according to Tacitus—because he was in the kind of panic where everything frightened him but his current predicament terrified him most. So he returned to the palace. Though huge, it was completely deserted. Even the humblest of his slaves had run off or scuttled away rather than face him. The silence and the solitude unnerved him. He tried closed doors and shuddered at the emptiness of the rooms beyond. Finally, worn out by his wretchedness and his aimless wanderings, he concealed himself in “a shameful hiding place,” and from this he was dragged by the tribune Julius Placidus (the man is otherwise unknown). “His hands were tied behind his back, his clothes were torn, and—a shameful spectacle—he was led through the streets. Many of the bystanders abused him, none pitied him. The ugliness of his end had destroyed all compassion. One of his German soldiers swung at him with his sword, but it is uncertain whether he did so in anger, or to put him out of his misery, or he may have been aiming at the tribune. He sliced off the tribune’s ear and was promptly cut down himself.”
Such is Tacitus’ account of Vitellius’ last hours, often discounted as fiction, because we cannot know what Vitellius was doing in the palace if there were no witnesses. This is silly. Obviously, Tacitus is giving us a historical reconstruction, but unless Vitellius simply curled up into a fetal ball, there was not much else he could have done, so long as he clung to life. Besides, Tacitus is trying to achieve an effect that occurs to neither Suetonius nor Dio, to view the situation through the emperor’s eyes. Since Vitellius refused to commit suicide, a point Tacitus chooses not to bring up, he must have been truly terrified, and this helps explain, among other things, why the imperial palace grows so much in size at this point. The structure Tacitus describes is far closer to Nero’s Golden House than it is to the relatively poky affair the Julio-Claudians inherited from Augustus. Similarly, it is not the decorum of historiography alone that induces Tacitus to suppress the sordid details of the emperor’s hiding place. According to Suetonius, Vitellius hid in a janitor’s closet, pulling a bed and a mattress across the door; according to Dio it was a room where the watch dogs were kept, and one of them bit the emperor. So too with Tacitus’ failure to report that the troops who entered the palace failed at first to recognize their ruler, another unflattering detail preserved by Suetonius and Dio. And so too, again, with his omitting the tale that Vitellius made a last attempt to wriggle out of trouble by claiming to possess “important information fit only for Vespasian’s ears,” yet another of Suetonius’ touches. In fact, Tacitus demonstrates a compassion for the emperor shown neither by the bystanders at the time nor later by the other sources.
This same attitude informs the rest of his narrative, as emerges from the contrasting ways in which Tacitus and Dio tackle Vitellius’ last minutes on earth. To judge by Xiphilinus’ summary of Dio, and by Suetonius’ slightly shorter and differently accentuated account, Dio followed the stock line and played up the theme how the mighty had fallen. “So they led down from the palace the Caesar who had lived there so luxuriously; along the Sacred Way they dragged the emperor who had often been carried past in his imperial litter, and to the Forum they took the Augustus who had often made speeches to the people there. Some struck at him, some pulled at his beard [Vitellius cannot have had time to shave]; all made fun of him, and insulted him, commenting especially on his prodigality since he had a pot belly. When he lowered his eyes in shame, the soldiers prodded him under the chin with their swords, to make him look up again.” On this follows his version of the attack by the German soldier, to whom he attributes only a wish to put Vitellius out of his misery. In this account, as in Suetonius’, Vitellius is the spectacle for everybody else to view. Tacitus’ briefer version takes a different tack. Having already explored this theme in—or even relocated it to—his description of Vitellius’ abdication, he has the soldiery make Vitellius raise his head to face the insults, to watch his statues being toppled, and to look again and again on the Rostra (where he had made his speech of abdication), or on the site of Galba’s murder (which he had precipitated by his bid for power). Then they drag him to the Stairs of Lamentation where the headless corpse of Flavius Sabinus had been exposed. Having remarked earlier that this was indeed a shameful spectacle, Tacitus once again invites the reader to see the situation through Vitellius’ eyes. The theme may be how the mighty are fallen, but his point is that no emperor, not even Vitellius, deserved to be treated like this.
Tacitus makes his approach explicit by recording the last comment Vitellius made before falling under a shower of blows. To a tribune who insulted him he replied, showing no ignoble spirit, that even so he had been the man’s emperor. Dio, to be sure, tells this story in much the same way, but he undermines the effect by reporting that the troops cut off Vitellius’ head and paraded it around the city, leaving his wife Galeria to give the remains proper burial. For his part, Suetonius knows nothing of any last words, and this is probably a deliberate omission, since he doted on collecting these remarks. Instead he has the body dragged on a hook to the Tiber and tossed in. Tacitus omits not only all such details but even this approach to the material. He sets up a contrast between an emperor who was capable of showing a not ignoble spirit and the mob that reviled Vitellius in death with the same viciousness with which they had fawned on him in life. It is a telling way of skewering both the malicious delight of the onlookers and the attitude of the earlier historians whose accounts Tacitus had criticized in his prologue.7
Just as the implication of all these remarks is that Vitellius did not deser
ve such treatment, so the theme of deserts holds together the obituary Tacitus devotes to him. The emperor gained his consulship, his priesthoods, and his place among the leading men of Rome through no efforts of his own, but by virtue of his father’s distinction. He was offered the principate by men who did not know him. And few commanders of good character won the enthusiastic support of the armies to the degree Vitellius won it by his worthlessness. Yet he was open and generous, even if self-destructively so. Since he thought friendships were won by magnificent gifts rather than consistent behavior, he deserved rather than held onto them. It was undoubtedly in the state’s best interests that he die, but those who betrayed Vitellius to Vespasian could not claim credit for their treachery, when they had deserted Galba for Vitellius. Vitellius should never have become emperor, but no more did he deserve so ignominious a death, even if it was in everybody’s interest that he die. Despite all the criticism to which Tacitus has been subjected for his portrayal of Vitellius, it is a fair epitaph for a man whose death late on 20 December left Vespasian undisputed emperor of Rome.
Conclusion
The killing of Vitellius late on 20 December ended the war, but it did not bring peace. Tacitus remarks that Domitian emerged from hiding as soon as it was safe, was hailed “Caesar” by the victorious Flavian troops, and was escorted to his father’s house. This merely underlines that what was safe for Domitian was not safe for others, whatever their rank. The magistrates were too scared even to call an emergency meeting of the senate. Flavian troops began roaming the city, hunting down the last Vitellians, killing innocent victims too, and, once they had sated their bloodlust, looting on the same grand scale as they had at Cremona. And ordinary citizens joined in, some of them—according to Dio—masquerading as Flavian soldiers in order to save their own skins. Dio’s further claim that “the casualties during these days were as many as 50,000” is clearly an exaggeration, but not perhaps quite as flagrant as it looks.
