The Twelve Caesars

by Matthew Dennison

  Like Vespasian’s association with Narcissus, a relationship forged at the same time, Otho’s connection with Nero would become increasingly double-edged in the fluctuating political climate of the period. As it happened, sexual jealousy destroyed their friendship long before Nero forfeited mastery of Rome. Following Nero’s death, in the unsettled and uncertain new world in which everything was to play for, the novus homo from Ferentium maintained an accurate evaluation of his Neronian credentials. As emperor he allowed the people to hail him ‘Nero Otho’; it was their own innovation and arose, it seems, spontaneously. Anticipating the outbreak of peace following his own accession – Otho issued coins with the unambiguous legend ‘Peace throughout the world’ (pax orbis terrarum)7 – and correctly judging that Galba’s ham-fistedness had forced a reassessment of Nero’s true worth, he capitalized on this change of heart in Rome by assigning fifty million sesterces to the task of completing the Golden House. Suetonius claims it as the first document Otho signed as emperor.9 Co-architect of this monument to Julio-Claudian grandeur, Otho perhaps hoped to acquire by association an aura of legitimacy.

  When it happened, Otho’s route to power was anything but circuitous. It came about through a double jealousy, first of Nero, second of that honourable but unremarkable aristocratic exile Piso Licinianus. Otho’s response in each case consisted of an act of revenge. Revenge twice taken, he found himself emperor of Rome.

  The process began in 58 or 59. Nero dispatched Otho to Portugal as governor of Lusitania. It was a significant appointment for a man of twenty-six or twenty-seven yet to undertake the praetorship (the usual stepping-stone to provincial governorship). But it was not a compliment. On the contrary, Nero intended the appointment as an act of banishment. It was an alternative to executing Otho and it owed its authorship to the tactful intervention of Seneca in what was an altogether unstatesmanlike squabble.

  The circumstances of the falling-out of emperor and acolyte are characteristic of the dog days of Julio-Claudianism. The argument centred on one of those ambitious and imperious women who, beginning in the reign of Claudius, exploited high breeding and good looks to achieve access to a power which they were neither constitutionally entitled to nor temperamentally suited to. In this case Poppaea Sabina, sometimes called the Younger (her mother was that Poppaea Sabina the Elder whose beauty had earned even Tacitus’ commendation and who had been forced in 47 to commit suicide by Claudius’ third wife Messalina, another of the type). Although the sources tell a confusing story, it appears that Poppaea, as beautiful as her mother and ambitious to boot, was married to Otho. Frequently in the emperor’s presence on account of the closeness of Otho and Nero’s friendship, she attracted the latter’s attention and the two embarked on a flirtation. (The alternative version has Otho marrying Poppaea specifically in order to make her available to Nero, then repenting too late of the pander’s course for which he does not have the stomach.) As emperors will – as we have seen with Octavian and Gaius and will see again with Domitian – Nero exercised a form of droit de seigneur and took Poppaea from Otho. Events were not, however, as clean-cut as this suggests. Otho yielded one sexual partner to another with an ill grace and may have opposed the couple’s marriage. For his part, Nero resented Otho’s continuing affection for the woman both men now claimed as their wife. Only Seneca’s solution of governorship of Lusitania served to remove the troublesome Otho from the equation still in possession of his life. The strength of feeling on all sides is attested by the length of Otho’s sojourn in his westerly retreat and by Nero’s failure to recall him in the aftermath of Poppaea’s death in 65. Suetonius suggests that Nero contented himself with Otho’s banishment as a form of damage limitation less likely to inspire gossip about palace bed-hopping than any course more obviously resembling retribution. Since Otho took the opportunity ‘promotion’ presented to fulfil the obligations of office with what the historian describes as ‘remarkable moderation and integrity’, his was the last laugh. As with Vespasian’s later governorship of Judaea, Otho’s Lusitanian banishment unexpectedly provided this louche and lackadaisical dandiprat with a springboard for empire.

  If Nero had hoped to silence scurrilous whispers through Otho’s removal, his success was only partial. Witty lines of doggerel circulated in smart salons. They were not quickly forgotten. On the brink of seizing power in 69, Otho found himself the victim of a smearing that resurrected with tabloid glee former habits of laxity and sexual indulgence. It formed the substance of Piso Licinianus’ appeal to Galban troops on the day both Piso and Galba were killed. ‘Already he is thinking of debaucheries, of revels, of tribes of mistresses,’ he claimed of Otho. ‘These things he holds the prizes of princely power, things in which the wanton enjoyment will be for him alone, the shame and the disgrace for all.’9 As so often, the ancient mindset refused to countenance the possibility of change. Despite his record of service in Lusitania, Otho would not be permitted to escape his garishly perfumed youth at Nero’s court. For Piso and Galba, that line was dictated by expediency. But it accounts too for the impact of Otho’s ‘noble’ death – the artificial oppositionalism of selfish youth and selfless demise invoked by ancient authors not in pursuit of veracity but in the interests of vigorous rhetorical contrast.

  In the event, Piso’s oratory was powerless to avert the consequences of Galba’s poor judgement. Otho became emperor of Rome with an ‘army’ whose core consisted of fifteen soldiers, the principate his for the price of a stewardship at court. (The bankrupt Otho funded purchase of the loyalty of his tiny band of fighting men with the million sesterces which Suetonius tells us he had extorted from one of Galba’s slaves in return for securing him a steward’s position.) Tacitus’ contempt, predictably, is boundless. But Tacitus, like Piso, would see only half the story.

  Suetonius pulls no punches: while it lasted, Otho’s support for Galba was nothing concerned with Galba, everything about Otho. It represented to the younger man a belated opportunity for revenge against Nero. A decade had passed since Otho’s banishment in the wake of Poppaea’s infidelity. Poppaea was dead, kicked out of this world by Nero, who now himself hovered on the brink of losing all. When, on 2 April 68, Servius Sulpicius Galba, governor of Nearer Spain, declared himself representative of the senate and people of Rome, Otho was first among provincial governors to join his cause. He gave Galba gold and silver goblets and even tables to be melted down for currency. Sharing Galba’s carriage, he set out on the journey to Rome. The older man, invincibly snobbish, nevertheless considered his comrade-in-arms ‘inferior to none as a man of affairs’.10 Already the tide was turning. The erstwhile drunkard, extravagant and foppish, in debt to the tune of anything between 5 and 200 million sesterces depending on the source consulted, had governed Lusitania with credit. Now, by dint of good behaviour and careful benefactions to Galba’s associates and inspired by Seleucus’ prophecy, which Suetonius dates to this point, we see the emergence of a different Otho, the man who in time would die with honour, lamented by his troops. Only the length of his memory offers pause for thought, a doubt about the princely qualities revealed in this slow-fermenting vengeance.

  Otho interpreted Seleucus’ presentiment as an indication that Galba would adopt him as his successor. We know that it was not to be. Otho’s response to disappointment which verged on shock appears to have been instinctive. He glimpsed the principate within his grasp: neither Galba nor Piso could withhold the prize that was rightfully his. (In addition, Suetonius and Tacitus claim that Otho’s debts denied him freedom of choice: only the throne could save him. Recklessness born of despair as much as anger shaped his course: he would rather die defying Galba than at the hands of his creditors.) On 15 January, nine months into Galba’s reign, Otho attended the emperor in his sacrifice in the temple. But Otho stayed only to hear the soothsayer’s prophecy of doom. Complacent with portents, he left the temple mid-service to meet, he claimed, architects and surveyors: racked by debts as all Rome knew, he could afford only the most derelict
of houses. By the Temple of Saturn in the Forum, he joined the risible band of helpmeets won over to his cause. Together they embarked on a coup – small in scale, short in duration, disorderly and ill-disciplined – which eventually won the day.

  As evening’s shadows lengthened, Otho was received by the senate at a meeting he himself had convened. The senators’ unedifying response to a revolution in which they had played no part survives in the written record as a syrupy cocktail of congratulation, flattery and adulation. ‘The more insincere their demonstrations, the more they multiplied them,’ Tacitus reports.11 Little matter. Those insincerities encompassed the title ‘Augustus’, the grant of tribunician power and a full roster of imperial honours. They also sanctioned implicitly a development of far-reaching implications: that the principate could fall to an opportunistic outsider through crime. It was no longer a catalyst for unity but the inspiration for conflict motivated neither by ideal nor by principle. Given Otho’s fait accompli, and the air of sinister menace which had blackened Rome since morning, the senate was in no position to debate the changing complexion of the purple. Shamefaced, it took its place among the losers of Otho’s coup, its power to direct the tide in Rome’s affairs cruelly exposed once again as a nostalgic illusion.

  After a decade’s absence from Rome, Otho asked for no more. Nero, Galba, Piso, even Poppaea – all who had opposed him were dead. The victory was his own and only his, since no point had been at stake: Otho’s argument with Galba was not dynastic, ideological, philosophical or even political, it was simply a struggle between a man who wanted to be princeps and believed himself portent-bound to be so and the man who threatened to thwart that aspiration, ‘his rage against Galba... his envy of Piso’, as Tacitus has it.12 There would be no benefit to Rome or Romans from Otho’s victory (save to those troops denied a donative by Galba, recompensed by his spendthrift successor). The swift-approaching contest between Otho and Vitellius would replicate this selfish emptiness. Before that, in the aftermath of Galba’s murder, soldiers attached to poles his severed head and that of his nominated heir and paraded them among the standards of the cohorts. Otho himself witnessed this carnival of the macabre at the end of a day of bloodshed and folly. (The sources report his particular pleasure at the sight of Piso’s bleeding head, which ‘he felt to be a right and lawful subject of rejoicing’.13) Vanished now was that distaste for violence which once had made him shudder at the mention of Brutus and Cassius’ fates. The spectacle on Rome’s streets was no more degraded than Otho’s own suspension of finer feelings.

  Driven by ambition and the pettiness of revenge, Rome’s newest emperor had nevertheless not forfeited good sense. On early coin issues Otho embraced the language of conciliation and reassurance: ‘SECURITAS P R’, the safety and freedom from care of the Roman people.14 We have no reason to assume irony. It is one of Dio’s ‘many temperate acts intended to conciliate the people’.15

  Following success, equanimity. ‘He did not remember his own private grievances against any man soever,’ Plutarch tells us.16 It was an attitude in stark contrast to Galba’s stony vindictiveness. Instead, apprised at his accession of Vitellius’ counter-bid for power (which, we have seen, can be traced at least to the beginning of the year and the German soldiery’s failure to swear the New Year oath of loyalty), Otho apparently set out to achieve a consensus in Rome and, looking further afield, support among the legions of the Empire. He invoked the auspices of Augustus, Livia and Claudius to endow his regime with divine protection as well as to confer that legitimacy which, even now, remained the exclusive possession of the Julio-Claudians.17 With an eye to the armies of the East, he reappointed Vespasian’s brother Flavius Sabinus to the post of city prefect from which Galba had removed him. Looking north, he confirmed a March consulship for Verginius Rufus, former commander of the Rhine legions. (This careful piece of flattery does not appear to have adherents in Germany.) In Rome itself, with greater success, he applied himself to increasing his power base by winning over supporters of his murdered predecessor. Among high-profile defections to his cause was the distinguished general and Galban loyalist Marius Celsus. Sparing Celsus won Otho not only a first-rate military commander but an Empire-wide reputation for mercifulness, a quality prized highly by successive emperors. In a gesture guaranteed to contrast with Galba’s meanness, Otho restored confiscated property to Neronian victims in cases where restitution was possible.

  Politically astute, this programme of inclusion wore an appropriately ‘imperial’ aspect. Unlike Gaius, Otho required no lessons in the dignity of the purple. ‘To the surprise of all,’ Tacitus recorded, Otho ‘was not sinking down into luxury and sloth. He deferred his pleasure, concealed his profligacy.’18 For Tacitus, there is always a pickle in the pie. Such behaviour, far from reassuring Rome’s upper classes, served only to increase their misgivings: ‘men dreaded all the more virtues so false, and vices so certain to return.’ It may be true. Given the speed at which Otho’s reign was overtaken by calamity, former vices had no opportunity to return.

  To outward appearances Otho’s conduct at the beginning of his principate offered a direct refutation of the Tacitean assurance that power acquired by crime could not be retained by a sudden assumption of moderation.19 By decree of the senate, Otho laid at least one ghost of the past. He ordained the restoration of surviving statues of Poppaea.10 Unrepentant regarding his connection with Nero’s regime, Otho’s loyalty was above all things pragmatic. The letter he wrote to Tigellinus demanding his suicide sacrificed Nero’s hated ex-Praetorian prefect to expediency and a notable groundswell of popular pressure.

  Having achieved power unconstitutionally, Otho cultivated punctiliousness in relation to Roman procedural propriety. Although in company with his brother Salvius Titianus he replaced Galba and Vinius as consuls for the first two months of the year, in his arrangements for the consulship thereafter he largely respected appointments already made by Nero and Galba. The result, according to Plutarch, was to convince Rome’s noblest and most influential citizens that, far from being ‘some genius of retribution or avenging spirit that had suddenly fallen upon the state’, Otho would preside over a government of smiling countenance.20 Such was the nature of Vitellius’ threat that it would not be enough. Nor was it sufficient to grant the emperor quiet rest. While anxieties about Vitellius and the German legions filled his days, his nights were disturbed by dreams of Galba. In Otho’s dream, Galba returned to life to oust his youthful usurper. Awake, he struggled with expiatory rites, acts of propitiation whose outcome he could not predict. His dream prevented him from sleeping. In the morning, dizzy with tiredness, he stumbled in the palace or the temple. Taking the auspices, a storm blew up. With relish, Suetonius recounts this concatenation of portents. To author as to reader the writing is on the wall.

  Otho’s war record fails to impress. On balance the arena of war was not the ideal environment for this emperor preoccupied with the softness of his skin and the sleek alignment of a toupee which, commended for its verisimilitude by Suetonius, in surviving portraiture resembles nothing so much as a crocheted tea-cosy. Emperor in the interests of self-fulfilment, Otho possessed neither experience of military campaigning nor any connection with the troops beyond his ability to pay their wages. In this, too, he represents a departure for the principate to date. Unfortunately for Otho, inexperience and unsuitability were not enough to stem the tides of war. For his efforts on the campaign trail, he would afterwards be rewarded in Juvenal’s Satires with unflattering comparisons with Cleopatra.21

  At first, it seems, Otho had doubted war’s inevitability. His initial response to news of Vitellius’ revolt had been a deputation from the senate instructed to inform the insurgents that a new emperor had already been chosen and that peaceable acquiescence represented the wiser course. Predictably it fell flat. Otho then opened a correspondence with Vitellius, in which emperor offered to buy off would-be emperor and, in Suetonius’ version, enter into a tentative power-sharing arrangement. Vit
ellius’ reply made a similar offer to Otho, at which point their communication degenerated into an undignified exchange of insults – ‘foolish and ridiculous’, as Plutarch points out, since one stormed the other with reproaches applicable to both, chief among them their common unsuitability to reign.22 In March, with no alternative in sight and, in Tacitus’ account, mindful that delay had hastened Nero’s downfall, Otho left Rome for a head-on collision with Vitellius’ men in northern Italy.

  Suetonius devotes less space to the brief campaign in which Otho was defeated (although this constitutes the major event of his principate) than to the consequences of that defeat. There is a workaday quality to his report, as if the portents which attended Otho’s departure render further explanation superfluous. The emperor’s leave-taking was double-damned: he embarked when the sacred shields had been removed from the Temple of Mars, during the days of mourning which commenced the festival of Cybele, both alike inauspicious. Added to religious proscriptions was the meteorological glitch of the Tiber in flood. Otho’s route out of Rome, which took him across the Campus Martius and eventually along the Via Flaminia, was blocked by fallen buildings: risen to unprecedented heights, the river had broken its banks, engulfing not only the city’s poorer, low-lying districts but areas usually reckoned safe from flooding. Tacitus and Plutarch add to this potent mix a statue of Julius Caesar revolving on its pedestal on an island in the Tiber so that it pointed not west but east, and the sudden, spine-chilling phenomenon, in the porch of the Temple of Jupiter, of Victory, mounted in a chariot, dropping the chariot’s reins ‘as if she had not power to hold them’.23 In Etruria, ancestral homeland of the Othones, an ox spoke aloud, its unexpected utterance undoubtedly a litany of peril.