69 AD: The Year of Four Emperors

by Gwyn Morgan

  The Flavian leaders did—maybe could do—little or nothing to control their men. Domitian was escorted to the palace the next day (21 December), but there he indulged in riotous parties celebrating his survival. The new, perhaps self-appointed prefect of the praetorian guard was Arrius Varus, and he was almost certainly too busy trying to reorganize the guard to have time to restore law and order outside the camp. And real power rested with Antonius, who allegedly spent his time helping himself to cash and slaves from the imperial household. The chaos began to abate only when news arrived that Lucius Vitellius was on his way back from Tarracina with his six cohorts. Unwilling to draw attention to the fact, or to the attendant irony, that here too Lucius did something to benefit Rome, Tacitus makes the Flavians’ organizing themselves for battle the product of frenzied pleas from the city they were so busy terrorizing. The result was an anticlimax. Lucius surrendered without a fight, his praetorians were disarmed and led through the streets of Rome, and Lucius himself was put to death.

  This did little to restore normal conditions. Yet the senate was able to persuade itself that peace was nigh: “now that the civil wars had worked their way through every province and every army from one end of the empire to the other, the entire world had been, as it were, cleansed of its madness.” Safe in this delusion, says Tacitus, the members attended a meeting on 21 December, and quickly fell to quarreling amongst themselves with their customary gusto. Vespasian was recognized as the new emperor, naturally. Mucianus was voted triumphal ornaments for his success in Moesia, and the other Flavian leaders, Domitian included, were granted assorted distinctions. Then the senators passed a resolution to restore the Temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest. According to senatorial etiquette, matters affecting the gods were to be taken up first, but on this occasion the members were confronted with a letter from Vespasian, and prudence as well as self-interest dictated that it be put at the head of the agenda and discussed with a show of unanimity. Once they turned to the restoration of the temple, the stiff-necked Helvidius Priscus threw a wrench in the works. So was Rome robbed of any guidance, says Tacitus: the defeated Vitellians grumbled, the victorious Flavians got nothing done, and later senate meetings bogged down in petty quibbles and pointless recriminations. In Tacitus’ words, “there was no emperor, and there were no laws.”

  What changed the situation was Mucianus’ arrival with his army, in the first week of January 70 apparently. Within days he settled everybody’s hash, acting throughout like a plenipotentiary. Dio asserts that he had a signet ring given him for the purpose by Vespasian, but he would probably have behaved this way with or without authorization. Domitian Mucianus he neutralized by taking him firmly under his own wing. Arrius Varus he switched from prefect of the guard to prefect of the grain supply, a demotion but not a marked one, since a man with energy to spare was needed to deal with the food shortages from which Rome was suffering as a result of all the extra military mouths to feed. And Antonius he took out of play, first by dangling before his eyes the prospect of becoming governor of Tarraconensis in place of Cluvius Rufus, and then by sending him off to Vespasian. Assorted other aristocrats were removed too, among them Piso Galerianus, a son of the Piso who had headed the conspiracy against Nero in 65. He was “taken for a ride” some 40 miles down the Appian Way and then “persuaded” to commit suicide, a move that amply fulfilled its programmatic intention of cowing the senate. And the troops who had been Antonius’ foremost supporters were given their marching orders: III Gallica, which had been billeted for a while in Capua to punish the town for backing Vitellius, was returned to Syria without delay; VII Galbiana was sent back to Pannonia with the same dispatch; VIII Augusta, XI Claudia, and XIII Gemina were bundled off to Lower Germany, to form part of the huge army Petillius Cerialis was marshaling against the rebels under Julius Civilis. Thus, says Tacitus, “the laws regained their force, the magistrates their functions.”

  Vigorous as they were, these measures settled only the most pressing problems. Vespasian would announce presently that he needed 40,000 million sesterces to get the empire back on its feet, but he would not reach Rome for another ten months. (As best we can tell, he arrived between September and November 70.) By then Mucianus had taken care of much more dirty work, including the execution of Vitellius’ son. His claim that the boy was a threat to peace looks specious, when we take into account the fact that Otho’s nephew Cocceianus would live on into the early 90s, but Cocceianus was never proclaimed heir to the throne. Besides, Mucianus’ removal of Vitellius’ son left Vespasian free to present himself in a more merciful light, as he did by finding a dowry and a suitable husband for Vitellius’ daughter. The first question we need to address, however, is whether the civil wars of 68/69 lived up to the billing Tacitus gives them, whether the year that opened with the consulship of Galba and Titus Vinius truly was “very nearly the last year of Rome’s existence.”

  The general statements made by the literary sources suggest that every part of the empire suffered enormously during these upheavals. This is another exaggeration. There was scarcely a province untouched in some way by the fighting over the throne, and in many there was loss of life and destruction of property. But in most areas the damage was neither catastrophic nor irreparable. The province Africa, for example, suffered for a few months in 68 from the attentions of the legate Clodius Macer, a small-time tyrant as Tacitus calls him, and later there would be a miniwar between the rival cities of Lepcis Magna (Lebdah) and Oea (Tripoli). The two Mauretanian provinces witnessed the murder of their governor, Lucceius Albinus, while the inhabitants of Corsica participated in the forcible removal of theirs, Picarius Decumus. There was disorder in Britain, where the legionary legates drove out their governor and quarreled among themselves, a situation of which the Brigantes took advantage to throw off their allegiance to Rome. Yet little came of all this, and the campaigning that began in the island in 71 was carried out in areas north of the province’s frontiers. There was Caecina’s bloodthirsty march through the territory of the Helvetii in spring 69. There was the pseudo-Nero who managed to terrorize a single Aegean island, Cythnus, likewise in the early spring of 69. There was the uprising masterminded by Anicetus in Pontus that led to piratical activity along the southern coast of the Black Sea later in the year, and Josephus tells us that other pirates took advantage of the Jewish Revolt to operate out of Joppa. Finally, Syria and Asia Minor were subjected to Mucianus’ money-raising efforts. But while most of this would likely not have happened, had the emperor in Rome not been distracted by the need to fight off another contender for the throne, none of it warrants talk of threats to Rome’s existence.

  From that perspective only four areas suffered major damage and serious loss of life, and we can take them in what the Romans would have considered an ascending order, from the least to the most serious. The Jewish Revolt, then, was obviously a catastrophe, albeit a catastrophe that was a distraction from rather than a result of the civil wars. As it happened, Vespasian swiftly forced the rebels to take refuge in this town or that, and proceeded methodically to capture those towns one by one. If the conflict lasted longer and caused more suffering than it need have done, that was due to the virtual cessation of military activity during 69. But though the fighting cost the Romans casualties, especially after Titus took command, and the destruction lost them revenues, there was never any doubt that the Romans would prevail.

  In Moesia the situation probably looked less immediately worrying, but it was taken more seriously. Hence Otho’s reaction to the victory gained over the Rhoxolani in the winter of 68/69, and the haste with which Antonius dispatched ex-Vitellian legions to the province after the sack of Cremona. After this came the incursion Mucianus had to beat off and the defeat of Fonteius Agrippa in the winter of 69/70. It matters little that different tribes mounted these raids across the Danube. The important consideration is that, whatever the cause for it, there was serious unrest among the peoples on the northern bank of the river. This was a danger tha
t would force the Flavian emperors over time to switch their attention—and their legions—from the Rhine to the Danube line, and it was a danger that Trajan would decide eventually to remove by conquering Dacia in two costly, full-scale wars at the start of the second century.

  In Gaul and the two Germanies, the military districts alongside the Rhine, the situation was manifestly much worse. Gaul suffered repeatedly, in fact, one area after another, and this was the wealthiest of Rome’s western provinces. In 68 there was Vindex’s unsuccessful siege of Lugdunum and the slaughter of Vesontio. In 69 the Riviera coast suffered from the attentions of Otho’s maritime expedition and the Vitellian detachments sent to oppose them. Meanwhile, if we believe Tacitus’ lurid account, there was the devastation Valens’ march caused between Colonia Agrippinensis in the north and the Alps in the south. Perhaps as a side effect of all this there was the small-scale disturbance created by the Boian Mariccus, who raided the territory of the Aedui for a while. And northern Gaul, Belgica, the least developed area, suffered most when the situation got out of hand at the end of the year. Once the tribesmen heard of the firing of the Capitol in December 69, they threw in with Julius Civilis and his Batavians. This caused major devastation in the two German districts as well, and led to the destruction of two Roman legions (I Germanica and XV Primigenia), and eventually to Vespasian’s cashiering two more (IV Macedonica and XVI), for all that he absorbed some of the surviving Vitellians into two new legions (IV Flavia Felix and XVI Flavia Firma). Besides this, the area was reduced only by hard fighting, which had to be conducted by nine legions, divided between Petillius Cerialis and the ex-Othonian Annius Gallus, and lasted all through 70. After it was all over, no less than three legionary camps along the Rhine had to be rebuilt, Novaesium (Neuss), Bonna (Bonn), and Mogontiacum (Mainz), while a fourth, Vetera (Xanten), was not only rebuilt but relocated too.

  Finally, there was Italy, and another of Tacitus’ reasons for confining his account largely to the events of 69. As he says apropos of Otho’s departure from Rome in March, it was the flooding of the Tiber, the shortage of grain, and the tight money supply that first brought home the seriousness of the situation to people in the city. Most of the strife in 68 they had been able to ignore because it took place in provinces; Vindex’s revolt could be passed off as a foreign war; and horrendous as it must have been to witness, the massacre of the marines at the Milvian Bridge could be discounted as an isolated incident. In 69, by contrast, war not only came to Italy but stayed too.

  South of Rome the damage seems to have been minor. Capua was punished by having III Gallica billeted on it, but only for a few weeks. Tarracina no doubt suffered more severely (Tacitus reports only that the slave who had betrayed the town to Lucius Vitellius was crucified for his pains), but it too recovered. North of Rome, on the other hand, not a season passed without misfortune. In the spring, there was the damage to towns along the western coast done by Otho’s maritime expedition, and Caecina’s assault on Placentia. In the summer, when Vitellius relocated the defeated Othonians after Bedriacum, there was the firing of part of Augusta Taurinorum (Turin), and the emperor’s locustlike progress from Bedriacum to Rome, not to mention the brief uproar created in the northeastern corner of the peninsula (Histria) by the runaway slave Geta. And in the fall there was the campaign by Antonius Primus’ troops, a campaign that must have damaged other towns before as well as after the sack of Cremona. As for Cremona itself, Tacitus reports that the city was rebuilt thanks to the generosity of its leading citizens, but as Guy Chilver observed long ago, “the rebuilding … must have been only nominal, since there are few remains and the scanty inscriptions are almost all of the period before A.D. 69.”

  As Tacitus says, Vespasian encouraged the Cremonans to rebuild their city, but gave them no financial assistance. In this, however, Vespasian was not merely exhibiting his tightfistedness. It looks as though he was also refusing to accept responsibility for the disaster, and he was certainly acting on the basis of a widespread conviction that the city’s destruction was insignificant by comparison with the damage done in Rome. There, having survived both the praetorian mutiny and the natural disasters that coincided with Otho’s departure in March, the people took his suicide with remarkable equanimity. It did not last. Vitellius billeted his army all over the city, and the people had but a brief respite when Caecina took most of the men north in September. In December there was the sack of the Capitol and the reappearance of soldiery in huge numbers, and this time there was fighting in the streets and looting everywhere. This is one reason why Vespasian and his sons launched an ambitious building program. Besides the restoration of the temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest (Vespasian himself took a prominent role in the initial stages), new structures were erected aplenty. It was no accident that one of the first was the Temple of Peace vowed in 71.

  We can declare the Romans parochial for viewing the situation exclusively in terms of what happened in their own city, but the center of any self-respecting empire is supposed to enjoy the benefits provided by its dependencies, not to suffer from the ills its rule or misrule generates. Besides, speculative as such an inquiry may look, there is the question of how much psychological damage these wars did to the inhabitants of Rome. On a grand scale, so we could argue, the very fact that Augustus’ dynasty had lasted for a century had created an impression of stability and order that the citizenry expected to last, if not forever, at least far into the future. They may not have cared to be ruled by an eccentric like Caligula or a degenerate like Nero, but even the worst excesses of the Julio-Claudians cannot have prepared them for the game of musical thrones that began in June 68. Small wonder that the senators in December 69 so happily embraced the idea that “now that the civil wars had worked their way through every province and every army from one end of the empire to the other, the entire world had been … cleansed of its madness.”

  Whether the “ordinary Roman in the street” would have thought in such terms is another matter. But it is probably unwise to assume that his everyday life proceeded normally throughout this period either. Suetonius declares that by the time Vespasian arrived in Rome, the courts were so clogged with unheard lawsuits that extraordinary measures were needed to clear the logjam. What neither he nor any other source mentions is the still more prosaic subject of criminal activity. Given that the praetorian and urban cohorts—the primary guarantors of civil order—were as often absent from Rome in 69 as they were present, there is no reason to think that, just because there was a war on, there was a cessation of “normal” criminal activity, as distinct from the political crimes on which emperors focused and the military crimes to which Tacitus gave space. Some 50 years later the satirist Juvenal derived considerable amusement from the fact that the Pontine Marshes south of Rome served as a kind of ancient Sherwood Forest, and that every time troops were sent to sweep the area, the “career criminals” migrated to Rome and exercised their skills there during the troops’ absence. The to-ing and fro-ing of the armed forces in 69 should have made it a banner year for criminals. Those inclined to antisocial behavior could mask their activities as military operations when the troops were present, and conduct them unmolested when the troops were away. This cannot have encouraged a sense of security in citizens at any level of society in Rome.

  Yet if Tacitus’ verdict is to this extent less far-fetched than we might fancy, it does not justify our concluding that the Romans would be haunted for years by their suffering. The Romans had longer memories than we do, in good measure because they had to rely on them much more. But when the Flavians bent their every effort to convincing people that 68/69 had been only a momentary hiccup in Rome’s glorious history, it is hardly surprising that the evidence does not support a number of themes stressed in the recent past. Consider, for a start, the phenomenon of which Tacitus himself was a beneficiary, the shake-up in the governing class that supposedly robbed the republican families of their hitherto unchallenged preeminence. It is one thing to observe of the
social standing of the emperors thrown up in 68/69 that “the premium on ancestry fell sharply.” It is quite another to translate this lapidary comment by Sir Ronald Syme into a sociopolitical revolution, in which the right to claim the throne shifted from the old republican aristocracy through the new Augustan nobility to arriviste Julio-Claudian functionaries. Though all the Julio-Claudian emperors could trace their ancestry back to republican families, there were few enough of them left when Augustus became master of the Roman world in 31 B.C., let alone when he died 44 years later. In this light the reign of Galba looks more like the last gasp of the republican aristocracy—and an excellent reason for ensuring that men like him and his heir, Piso Licinianus, were never given another chance to occupy the throne. Galba was an anachronism in more ways even than Tacitus thought.

  It is no more significant that Otho and Vitellius came from the new nobility brought to the fore by the Augustan settlement. By 69 such men were probably the largest segment in the senatorial class, no matter what level they had reached inside the élite. Otho, however, was hamstrung by his inability to win the trust of his peers in the senate, thanks largely to the methods he had used to remove Galba. And if Vitellius was the least suited member of his generation to take the throne, his failings merely confirmed the lesson the Romans should have learnt from Galba, not to mention the four Julio-Claudians, that ancestry need not be synonymous with ability. Yet neither this nor Vitellius’ inability to present Rome with a functioning, adult heir made it inevitable that his successor would come from a family whose nobility was freshly minted in the Julio-Claudian period. No ineluctable historical process put Vespasian on the throne. He became emperor because he was the last man standing, and he was the last man standing because so few took him seriously beforehand. As emperor, it is true, he delighted in his humble origins. Perhaps he was struck by the irony that once he had no more wanted to be a senator than Vitellius had wanted to be an emperor. More probably, he was so proud of his success, achieved against all the odds, that he thought it ridiculous to try at 60 years of age to pass himself off as what he was not. Either way, his accession still astonished Romans 50 years later, as is evidenced by the profuse apologies for the obscurity of those origins with which Suetonius prefaces his Life.