As they survive in the sources, his actions confuse us: for all his seeming recklessness, Vitellius evidently meant to found a dynasty. Although he refused for himself the title ‘Augustus’, he created his mother Sestilia ‘Augusta’ on his arrival in Rome in July 69. Earlier, at a victory celebration at Lugdunum, he had paraded in front of the troops his son by his second wife, Galeria Fundana, dressed in the accoutrements of imperial rank. It was a sign of dynastic intent undermined only by the boy’s status as a six-year-old virtual mute suffering from a chronic stammer. In addition, Vitellius issued gold and silver coins featuring images not only of his son but also of his daughter; other coins celebrated his father, who had added to his tally of consulships the censorship too. Vitellius was only the second generation of his recent family to attain prominence. Nothing daunted, he asserted through his coinage claims to a stake in Rome’s past and future. As far as it went, it was shrewd policy: among Vitellius’ few distinctions was his possession of an heir of his own blood, a claim unmatched by Galba, Otho or any of his predecessors (since the sons of Tiberius and Claudius had not survived); while given Romans’ belief in heredity, such a father added lustre to his son’s imperial candidacy. The tide of events would jeer at Vitellius’ numismatic hubris, his own reign quickly over, his son (youth notwithstanding) killed by an associate of Vespasian’s. By Dio’s time his memory survived only in a name given to expensive cakes.8
Like the Divine Julius and Otho before him, Vitellius was a spendthrift restored to solvency by the premiership. Such were the constraints on his purse previously that, leaving Rome for governorship of Lower Germany in the autumn of 68, he had funded his journey by pawning a pearl earring belonging to his mother and extorting 50,000 sesterces from an unwisely importunate freedman on a trumped-up action for damages. (His wife and children he was forced to rehouse in a rented garret.) Afterwards, invested with power by the senate, he was unable to pay the troops’ accession donative. A principate which began in straitened circumstances quickly revealed the larger, more pressing bankruptcy at its heart.
Vitellius was the emperor defeated by Rome. A proactive governor of Lower Germany, he won over to his cause the disaffected legions of two provinces within less than two months; Suetonius describes them as welcoming him with hands upraised as if in thanks to heaven. Invested with ultimate power in the capital, he was unable to maintain either momentum or resolve. Earlier, in 60, he had served as proconsul of Africa with ‘exceptional integrity for two successive years’; in the discharge of the Roman priesthoods awarded to him by Nero in the same period, he stooped to theft and deceit. We may never know if those generals who placed Vitellius on the throne subsequently wondered at their choice. Examination of the emperor’s former record would have removed their grounds for surprise. As it happened, it hardly mattered. Awaiting Vespasian’s victory, no serious alternative candidate for the purple suggested himself. In the two months that elapsed between Vitellius’ confirmation as emperor by the senate at Ticinum (modern Pavia) and his arrival in Rome, the city had no leader and no real government. That no ambitious adventurer snatched the opportunity to step into the breach and usurp Vitellius’ unclaimed throne tells us much about the crisis in Rome’s affairs.
In a technique with which we are now familiar, Suetonius offers us alternative accounts of Vitellius’ family history: on the one hand, ancient nobility gilded by association with a goddess of the countryside; hard-nosed, low-level self-seeking on the other. Whatever the truth, Vitellius’ own career combined both impulses. His history, particularly at Nero’s court, was one of grasping sycophancy, but as emperor he was capable of clemency and modesty towards his opponents and he had earlier shown himself a gifted provincial administrator able to assess and respond to the needs of situations outside his ken. Prior to Vespasian, one lesson of this tumultuous year was the inadequacy of imperial proconsulships as an apprenticeship for the throne: like Vitellius, Galba and Otho had both served with distinction abroad.
If Suetonius is reliable, Aulus Vitellius, born in AD 15, inherited as much from the uncle whose name he shared as from his father. That Aulus Vitellius, one of four sons of the equestrian Publius Vitellius of Nuceria – ‘whether of ancient stock or of parents and forefathers in whom he could take no pride, unquestionably... a steward of Augustus’ – inclined to luxury and died during his consulship in 32, when his impressionable nephew was seventeen. This uncle was ‘especially notorious for the magnificence of his feasts’. Of his three brothers, only Lucius Vitellius, father of the future emperor, maintained a course approaching credit, though Suetonius darkens his memory with accusations of overweening obsequiousness towards Gaius – whom he worshipped openly as a living god, the first in Rome to do so – and Claudius, whose wives and freedmen he cultivated with shameless fawning. (He resorted to carrying about with him like a talisman a shoe belonging to the empress Messalina, which he concealed beneath his toga and occasionally, when observed, withdrew and kissed.) Such cloying fulsomeness earned dividends. A notably successful governor of Syria, Lucius Vitellius added to the triple consulship and censorship stewardship of the Empire while Claudius was absent from Rome on his expedition to Britain in 43 – access to power that was unusual during this period for a senator outside the imperial family. It exposed his two sons, both of them future consuls, to the innermost workings of the state. We cannot know to what extent, if any, that experience inspired future ambitions, nor do we read of the reaction of Vitellius’ mother Sestilia to her husband’s proximity to Claudius’ government. Tacitus casts Sestilia as an old-fashioned matron worthy of the Republic, serious and righteous. (Her reaction to her son’s principate is one of despondency rather than delight.) Perhaps those were the very qualities which drove her husband into the arms of that freedwoman whose spittle, Suetonius tells us, Lucius Vitellius mixed with honey and rubbed on his throat and his jaws as medicine.
Such a close association with the former regime may explain why Vitellius felt able to rule without adopting ‘Augustus’ or ‘Caesar’ as elements of his official nomenclature: under the circumstances, such verbal links were superfluous. It may also account for the apparently limited efforts he would ultimately make to justify his position as princeps. In instituting sacrifices to Nero’s memory at an altar on the Campus Martius, he both reiterated his Julio-Claudian credentials and sought to enfranchise remaining Neronian sympathizers (among whom he counted himself and could certainly have numbered those German legions who, responsible for his own premiership, had hailed Galba only under duress and never acclaimed Otho); he also retained Nero’s coinage (and that of Galba and Otho) and resisted confiscating gifts bestowed by his predecessors. Deliberately or otherwise, Vitellius played a double game, simultaneously declaring his own loyalties and placing himself in a continuum of imperial rulers of Rome that did not distinguish between Julio-Claudians and more recent incumbents. Over the course of the following decade, Vespasian's and Titus’ efforts to capitalize on their connections with Claudius and Britannicus respectively show that the political climate in Rome had not changed to the extent that Augustus’ family could be lightly overlooked. What appeared like moderation may have been a miscall on Vitellius’ part.
For an audience which accepted the view that character was immutable and fixed from earliest infancy, Suetonius’ portrait of Vitellius includes speaking details. Such were the (unspecified) predictions of the horoscope produced by astrologers at his birth that his father determined to prevent any award of a province to his son, while his mother apparently ‘mourned over him as lost’ after his dispatch by Galba to Lower Germany and subsequent acclamation as emperor. Those predictions presumably touched upon that ‘cruelty’ later asserted by the sources, which Suetonius instances in the period before Vitellius’ elevation in an unpleasant anecdote concerning his first marriage. Vitellius had a son by his wife Petronia. Blind in one eye, Petronianus was rumoured to have been poisoned by his father, possibly to prevent him from inheriting Petronia’s fortune (
which, we assume, Vitellius wanted for himself). Suetonius reports this crime as hearsay. The future princeps’ own explanation was that, discovered in a plan to kill Vitellius and seized by guilt, Petronianus himself swallowed the poison he had mixed. We must make up our own minds. It is true that Vitellius would later express concern about the fates of his wife and children in the event of his abdication. But it is also true, as we have seen, that the sources preserve accusations of matricide and attest to a prodigal’s need for money matched by a lack of scruple in obtaining it: he is reported as embezzling the public revenues of Sinuessa and Formiae and instituting wholly deceitful legal proceedings when a creditor pressed him too hard for repayment.
On 1 January 69 the legions of Lower Germany refused to swear loyalty to Galba. One day later, German legionary commander and Neronian loyalist Fabius Valens hailed Vitellius as princeps. On 3 January, the legions mutinied in Upper Germany too, making cause with their neighbours. It was the first of two legionary revolutions that month. The second, which took place in Rome on 15 January and won the senate’s acknowledgement, made Otho emperor. To the latter’s colours rallied the legions of the Danube and Illyricum and those in the East; Vitellius was the unanimous choice of Western armies, including Britain. In Tacitus’ account, the craving for empire lay not with Vitellius but with Valens, who ‘stirred [Vitellius’] sluggish nature to covetousness rather than to hope’.9 It may also have been Valens, in partnership with his Upper German counterpart Aulus Caecina Alienus, ‘a handsome young man of towering stature and boundless ambition’ with whom he was otherwise out of sympathy, who strengthened Vitellius’ resolve against that barrage of missives dispatched from Rome by Otho, offering the former payment and sweet words in return for renouncing his claim to the throne. Whatever Vitellius’ frame of mind, neither Valens nor Caecina was predisposed to compromise. Both smarted under supposed slights from Galba – the former because of Galba’s failure to recognize in any concrete form his role in killing Fonteius Capito, the latter thanks to a prosecution brought by Galba against his embezzlement of public money during a quaestorship in Baetica. Like opportunists before and since, Caecina ‘[concealed] his private wounds among the misfortunes of the state’ and departed the Rhine for Rome at the head of his legion.10 Valens mobilized at the same time: his route, through Gaul, was longer and slower. This disposition of troops left Vitellius himself with the task of recruiting additional men for his rump army, at the head of which he also in time departed the legionary camps bent on combat with the Othonians. Valens’ and Caecina’s men regrouped in northern Italy outside Bedriacum, where Otho made his fateful decision to engage in premature battle. We know already the outcome. It was over long before Vitellius arrived.
Victory, however, was qualified, at one level no more than defeatism on Otho’s part. Suetonius presents Vitellius’ emergence as Rome’s ruler with ambivalence, recording those portents which decreed from the outset a short span for his principate: equestrian statues of the new emperor which, not yet complete, ‘on a sudden all collapsed with broken legs’, and Vitellius’ own laurel crown which tumbled into a gully. As with Otho, the omens were against the ninth Caesar. Undeterred, he ordered the execution of a number of soldiers who had assisted Otho’s murder of Galba, but resisted large-scale reprisals. Those he spared included Otho’s brother Salvius Titianus, a high-profile instance of clemency. His advance through Gaul took on the festal aspect of a triumphal progress, an affair of civic banquets, elegant boat trips, public spectacles and soldiers behaving badly. Private hosts were bankrupted in their attempts to satiate his jaded and intemperate appetite, and Tacitus recalls the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian Seas humming with vehicles hurrying to supply his every whim.11 The governor of Lugdunensis, a rich man of good family called Junius Blaesus, even lent the threadbare Vitellius clothes fitting his new station. It may have been a high point of this swinish reign. In Rome, news of Otho’s defeat and Vitellius’ victory, announced in the theatre, was greeted with applause but no outbreaks of disorder. Afraid any longer to express partisanship, a fear shared by the senate, the people responded to this latest change of regime with a passionless demonstration of what was expected of them. In time, they would learn something of that contempt which Tacitus attributes to Vitellius’ own troops, inspired by the emperor’s flabbiness of mind and body, his lethargy and indolence, and his slovenliness in the matter of military as well as personal discipline.
All that lay in the future on the hot July day when Vitellius made his entry into the capital. If the omens foretold disaster and wiser counsellors harboured misgivings, Vitellius himself exulted in a moment of personal glory. At the head of 60,000 troops, attended in Tacitus’ version by a damning collection of ‘actors, flocks of eunuchs and every other characteristic feature of Nero’s court’, he had planned his arrival in the garb of a conquering general, mounted, sword-toting, driving before him senators and people alike. Sounder minds prevailed: the emperor was made aware of the injudiciousness of presenting himself to the people of Rome as the conqueror of his fellow Romans. He wore civilian clothes and processed on foot. Those members of the senate who had travelled with him since the accession audience at Ticinum followed in his wake. None was under any illusion. Tacitus claims that the senate had already ‘passed votes of praise and gratitude to the troops from Germany’ for their role in Vitellius’ victory, a powerful statement of its own debasement;12 while Vitellius, in accepting the name Germanicus, which he in turn conferred upon his son, announced himself not as conqueror of the Rhine, the name’s former meaning, but as the appointee of the German legions. It was an invitation to factionalism and short-sighted at a moment when the government of Rome desperately needed consensus and strong guidance independent of the demands of any single self-interest.13 In the evening, celebration took the only form Vitellius understood: a dinner organized by his brother at which 2,000 of the choicest fishes and a colossal 7,000 birds were served. Suetonius condemned such excess as ‘notorious’.
With hindsight the biographer’s censoriousness adds little to our understanding. Even as Vitellius enjoyed that orgy of fin and feather, enemy forces were mobilizing. In Judaea, Vespasian had withheld the oath of loyalty. It was a sign. On 1 July, as the Vitellian convoy carved its uproarious passage through the country north of Rome, Tiberius Julius Alexander, prefect of Egypt, declared his legions’ support not for Vitellius but for Vespasian. Two days later, Syria and Judaea followed suit. The armies of the East, once loyal to Otho, disdained his successor, preferring instead a commander of their own. Such, at any rate, is the argument afterwards propounded by Flavian propaganda, in which Vespasian is borne aloft on wings of popular support. It would be naïve to overlook the probability of top-level coordination. Vitellius retained as city prefect Vespasian’s brother Flavius Sabinus. It was a gesture from which he failed to benefit. Once Flavian victory was assured, Sabinus would attempt to negotiate for Vitellius a peaceful handover of power.
But Vitellius’ was not a regime of negotiation and consensus. He owed his throne to force: the will of the German legions. In August, in Moesia, another legion felt similarly moved. ‘So great was the soldiers’ anger at Vitellius and their eagerness for plunder,’ Dio reports, that they marched on Italy under their commander Antonius Primus, heedless of alternative Flavian plans formulated at a higher level. On 24 October, they engaged with Vitellian troops on almost exactly the same spot at which the latter had so recently defeated troops loyal to Otho. On that occasion, Caecina and Valens had shared the victory. Six months later, Vitellius’ men were virtually leaderless. Apprised of the threat from the East, Caecina had moved first to the Empire’s defence. But his loyalty proved of a flexuous quality, corrupted, according to Tacitus, by Sabinus’ agents. Predictably he defected. Less predictably, he failed to convince his soldiers to join him. Enervated by the months of illness, indolence and ill discipline in Rome, perturbed by the ominous symbolism of a blood-red eclipse of the moon, but determined and surprisingly strong in
spirit, the Vitellians fought at Bedriacum in the name of an emperor who, as with earlier victory, was himself far away.
Vitellius remained in Rome, making occasional sorties to his villa at Aricia south of the city. In September he had sent Valens to the north. In Suetonius’ account, the emperor’s days are numbered and every course of action equally futile; Tacitus scorns his ‘hiding away in the shady arbour of his suburban estate, as if he were one of those slothful animals that lie around in a torpor, so long as you keep on feeding them’.14 In the short term, with no news of defeat and both commanders busy in the field, Vitellius had grounds for maintaining a semblance of normality. With Cremona sacked and Primus’ troops en route for Rome, all certainty vanished. Vitellius responded by sending troops to block the Apennine passes in an attempt to halt the enemy’s advance. Afterwards he joined the soldiers there himself. But the portents had defected as surely as Caecina. Vitellius offered sacrifice and prepared to address the army. A crowd of vultures targeted the altar, scattering the offerings and threatening to knock over the emperor. It was not a challenge to which Vitellius was capable of rising. Dio describes him as harried by indecision, erratic in his mood swings, oscillating between defiance and despair; unable to fix on a single course, to decide even on what clothes to wear, befuddled by fear or panic or simply the occlusions of good living. In place of leadership, he invoked the people’s pity, appearing before them clinging to the infant Germanicus. His speeches were contrary and confusing, advocating by turns war and defiance or an instant surrender and his own withdrawal into private life. It was the only period in his reign when Vitellius was required to act decisively: he failed. Dio describes the effect of his bewilderment as ‘chill[ing] the enthusiasm of almost everybody else, for when they saw him rushing hither and thither in such a frenzy, they ceased to carry out their orders with their usual diligence and began to consider their own interests as well as his’.15 Vitellius succeeded only in inspiring contempt; in that way, he lost the other half of the war.
The Twelve Caesars Page 22
