The army’s dislike of Galba having now reached a stage little short of mutiny, they welcomed Vitellius with open arms, as a gift from the gods. After all, here was the son of a man who had held three consulships; in the prime of life, too, and of an easy, generous disposition. Vitellius’s conduct on the march further enhanced their good opinion of him. He would greet even private soldiers with an embrace, and at wayside inns behaved most affably towards the muleteers and such like whom he met in the morning, inquiring whether they had yet breakfasted, and then belching loudly to prove that he had done so himself.
8. At his headquarters in Germany he granted every favour asked of him, and cancelled all punishments whatsoever, whether the man concerned were in disgrace, awaiting trial, or undergoing sentence. Consequently, before a month had passed, a group of soldiers suddenly crowded into his bedroom, saluted him as Emperor and, late though the hour was, carried him around the larger villages without even giving him time to dress. In the first flush of congratulation someone presented Vitellius with a drawn sword, taken from a temple of Mars, which had once been Julius Caesar’s, and this he carried in his hand. During his absence a stove set fire to the dining-room at Headquarters; but when this unlucky portent caused general concern he told the troops: ‘Courage, my men! Light is given us.’ That was the only speech he made them. The army in Upper Germany had previously pledged its loyalty to the Senate, rather than to Galba, and now came out in his favour. Vitellius then assumed the surname Germanicus, which everyone eagerly pressed on him, but hesitated to accept the title Augustus, and emphatically rejected the surname Caesar.
9. As soon as news reached Germany of Galba’s murder, Vitellius put his affairs in order: splitting the army into two divisions, one of which stayed with him. He sent the other against Otho, and it was at once granted a lucky augury: an eagle, swooping down from the right hand, hovered over the standards, and flew slowly ahead of the advancing columns. However, when he marched off with the second division, several equestrian statues raised in his honour collapsed because the horses’ legs were weakly made; also, the laurel wreath which he had so ceremoniously bound on his head fell into a stream, and a few days later while he was presiding over a court at Vienne, a rooster perched first on his shoulder, then on his hand. These presages were confirmed by future events, for he proved unable to support the weight of power won for him by his generals.
10. The news of the victory at Betriacum, and of Otho’s suicide, reached Vitellius before he had left Gaul. At once he disbanded all Guards battalions in Rome by a comprehensive decree, accusing them of a disgraceful lapse in discipline: they must surrender their arms to the commanding officers. He gave further orders for the arrest and punishment of 120 Guards known to have demanded a bounty from Otho in respect of services rendered at Galba’s assassination. These irreproachably correct acts raised the hope that Vitellius would make an admirable Emperor, but the rest of his behaviour was in keeping, rather, with the character he had shown in the past, and fell far short of the Imperial. At the outset of his march, for instance, he had himself carried through the main streets of the cities on his route, wearing triumphal dress; crossed rivers in elaborately decorated barges wreathed in garlands; and always kept a lavish supply of delicacies within reach of his hand. He let discipline go by the board, and would joke about the excesses committed by his men; not content with being wined and dined everywhere at public expense, they amused themselves by freeing slaves at random and then whipping, wounding, and even murdering whoever tried to restrain them. When he reached one of the recent battlefields, where the stench of unburied corpses caused some consternation, Vitellius cheered his companions with the brazen remark: ‘Only one thing smells sweeter to me than a dead enemy, and that is a dead fellow-citizen.’ Nevertheless, he took a good swig of neat wine to counteract this perfume and generously passed the flagon around. Equally offensive was his remark when he came across Otho’s simple headstone: ‘Well, he deserved this type of mausoleum.’ Having sent the dagger with which Otho had killed himself to the Temple of Mars at Cologne, he staged an all-night debauch on the slopes of the Apennines.
11. At last, amid fanfares of trumpets, Vitellius entered Rome in full uniform and surrounded by standards and banners—a display permitted only when the Senate had decreed a triumph or ovation for the defeat of a foreign army. His staff also wore military cloaks, and his soldiers carried drawn swords. Paying less and less attention to all laws, human or divine, Vitellius next assumed the office of Chief Pontiff, and chose to do so on the anniversary of the Allia defeat,89 a day of evil omen. On the same occasion he announced his appointments for the ten years ahead, and elected himself life-Consul. Then he dispelled any doubt as to which of the Caesars was to be his model by sacrificing to Nero’s ghost and, at the subsequent banquet, while a popular flautist was performing, called for something from Nero’s Dominicus as an encore. When the flautist obliged with one of these compositions, Vitellius jumped up delightedly and led the applause.
12. This was how his reign began. Later, he based many important political decisions on what the lowest performers in the theatre or arena told him, and relied particularly on the advice of his freedman Asiaticus. Asiaticus had been Vitellius’s slave and catamite, but soon grew tired of this rôle and ran away. After a while he was discovered selling cheap drinks at Puteoli, and put in chains until Vitellius ordered his release and made him his favourite. However, Asiaticus behaved so insolently, and so thievishly as well, that Vitellius sold him to an itinerant trainer of gladiators; but impulsively bought him back when he was just about to take part in the final match of a gladiatorial contest. When sent to govern Lower Germany, Vitellius freed Asiaticus, and on his first day as Emperor presented him with the gold ring of knighthood; which surprised everyone, because that very morning he had rejected a popular demand for this award, with the statement that Asiaticus’s appointment would disgrace the Order.
13. Vitellius’s ruling vices were gluttony and cruelty. He banqueted three and often four times a day, namely morning, noon, afternoon, and evening—the last meal being mainly a drinking bout—and survived the ordeal well enough by taking frequent emetics. What made things worse was that he used to invite himself out to private banquets at all hours; and these never cost his various hosts less than 4,000 gold pieces each. The most notorious feast of the series was given him by his brother on his entry into Rome; 2,000 magnificent fish and 7,000 game birds are said to have been served. Yet even this hardly compares in luxuriousness with a single tremendously large dish which Vitellius dedicated to the Goddess Minerva and named ‘Shield of Minerva the Protectress’. The recipe called for pike-livers, pheasant-brains, peacock-brains, flamingo-tongues, and lamprey-milt; and the ingredients, collected in every corner of the Empire from the Parthian frontier to the Straits of Gibraltar, were brought to Rome by naval triremes. Vitellius paid no attention to place or time in satisfying his remarkable appetite. While a sacrifice was in progress, he thought nothing of snatching lumps of meat or cake off the altar, almost out of the sacred fire, and bolting them down; and on his travels would devour cuts of meat fetched smoking hot from wayside cookshops, and even yesterday’s half-eaten scraps.
14. His cruelty was such that he would kill or torture anyone at all on the slightest pretext—not excluding noblemen who had been his fellow-students or friends, and whom he lured to Court by promises of the highest advancement. One of them, with fever on him, asked for a glass of cold water; Vitellius brought it with his own hands, but added poison. As for all the money-lenders, tax-collectors and dealers who had ever dunned him at Rome, or demanded prompt payment for goods or services on the road, it is doubtful whether he showed mercy in a single instance. When one of these men paid a courtesy call at the Palace, Vitellius sent him off to be executed, but a moment later countermanded the order. The courtiers praised this clemency, but Vitellius explained that he merely wished to give himself a treat by having the man killed before his eyes. Two sons came to
plead for their father’s life; he had all three of them despatched. A knight who was being marched away to his death called out: ‘You are my heir!’ Vitellius granted a stay of execution until the will had been produced; then, finding himself named as joint-heir with the knight’s freedman, ordered master and man to die together. He executed some of the commons for disparaging the ‘Blues’, on the suspicion that such criticism was directed against him. He particularly disliked lampoonists and astrologers, and made away at once with any who came up before him. This resentment dated from when an edict of his, forbidding any astrologers to remain in Italy after I October, had been capped with a counter-edict:
Decreed by all astrologers
In blessing on our State:
Vitellius will be no more
On the appointed date.
According to some accounts, a Chattian prophetess, whom Vitellius credited with oracular powers, had promised him a long and secure reign if he outlived his mother; so when she fell sick, he had her starved to death. Another version of the story is that his mother, grown weary of the present and apprehensive of the future, begged him for a supply of poison; a request which he was not slow to grant.
15. In the eighth month of Vitellius’s reign the Moesian and Pannonian legions repudiated him and swore allegiance to Vespasian; those in Syria and Judaea followed suit and could take their oaths to him in person. To keep the goodwill of his remaining troops, Vitellius embarked on a course of limitless public and private generosity. He opened a recruiting campaign and promised volunteers immediate discharge after victory, with the full rights and privileges of regular service. When Vespasian’s forces converged on Rome, he sent against them the troops who had fought at Betriacum, under their original officers, and put his brother in command of a fleet manned by recruits and gladiators. Realizing, however, that he was being beaten or betrayed on every side, he approached Flavius Sabinus, Vespasian’s brother, and asked: ‘What is my abdication worth?’ Sabinus offered him his life and a fee of a million gold pieces. Later, from the Palace steps, Vitellius announced his decision to the assembled soldiers, explaining that the Imperial power had, after all, been forced upon him. When an uproar of protest greeted this speech, he at once retracted it; but next day went in mourning to the Rostra and tearfully read it out again from a scroll. Once more the soldiers and the City crowds shouted ‘Stand fast!’ and outdid one another in their expressions of loyalty. Suddenly taking heart, Vitellius drove the unsuspecting Sabinus and his Flavian relatives into the Capitol, set fire to the Temple of Juppiter Greatest and Best, and burned them alive. He watched the play of the flames and his victims’ struggles while banqueting in the mansion which had belonged to the Emperor Tiberius; but was soon overcome by remorse and blamed someone else for the murder. He next called an assembly and forced all present to bear witness that peace was now his sole objective. Then, drawing his dagger of state, he tried in turn to make the Consul, the praetors, the quaestors, and the remaining senators accept it. When all refused, he went to lay it up in the Temple of Concord. However, they called him back by shouting: ‘No, my lord, you yourself are Concord!’ So back he came, saying: ‘Very well, I will keep the dagger and adopt the divine name you have graciously awarded me.’
16. Vitellius also made the Senate send envoys, accompanied by the Vestal Virgins, to arrange an armistice with Vespasian, or at least to gain time for deliberation. But on the following day, while he was waiting to hear the outcome of these pourparlers, a scout arrived with news that enemy detachments were close at hand. Stowing himself furtively into a sedan-chair, and accompanied by his pastry-cook and chef, he hurried to his father’s house on the Aventine. He had planned an escape from there into Campania. But a faint rumour of peace tempted him back to the Palace, which he found deserted, and when his two companions drifted away, he strapped on a money-belt full of gold pieces and hid in the janitor’s quarters, tethering a dog outside and jamming a bed against the door.
17. Vespasian’s advance guard had entered Rome without opposition, and at once began looting the Palace, as was to be expected. They hauled Vitellius from his hiding-place and, not recognizing him, asked who he was and whether he knew the Emperor’s whereabouts. Vitellius gave some lying answer, but was soon identified; so he begged to be placed in safe custody, even if that meant prison, because he must see Vespasian on a matter of life and death. Instead, his hands were tied behind him, a noose was fastened round his neck, and amid cheers and abuse the soldiers dragged him, half-naked, with his clothes in tatters, along the Sacred Way to the Forum. They pulled his head back by the hair, as is done with criminals, and stuck a sword-point under the chin, which exposed his face to public contempt. Dung and filth were hurled at him, also such epithets as ‘Greedy-guts’ and ‘Fire-raiser’; and his forlorn appearance occasioned loud laughter. Indeed, Vitellius looked queer enough even at his best, being unusually tall, with an alcoholic flush, a huge paunch and a limp, the result of a chariot-crash—Caligula had been driving at the time. The soldiers put him through the torture of the little cuts before finally killing him near the Stairs of Mourning. Then they dragged his body to the Tiber with a hook and threw it in.
18. Vitellius died at the age of fifty-six; nor did his brother and son outlive him. The omen of the rooster at Vienne (noted above) had been interpreted as meaning that a Gaul would kill him—gallus is both a ‘cock’ and a ‘Gaul’. This proved correct: the officer who despatched him was one Antonius Primus, a native of Toulouse, and his boyhood nickname had been Becco (‘rooster’s beak’).
X
VESPASIAN
AFTERWARDS DEIFIED
The Flavians, admittedly an obscure family, none of whose members had ever enjoyed high office, at last brought stable government to the Empire; they had found it drifting uneasily through a year of revolution in the course of which three successive emperors lost their lives by violence. We have no cause to be ashamed of the Flavian record, though it is generally admitted that Domitian’s cruelty and greed justified his assassination.
Titus Flavius Petro, a burgher of Reiti, who fought for Pompey in the Civil War as a centurion, or perhaps a reservist, made his way back there from the battlefield of Pharsalus; secured an honourable discharge, with a full pardon, and took up tax-collecting. Although his son Sabinus is said either to have been a leading-centurion, or to have resigned command of a battalion on grounds of ill-health, the truth is that he avoided military service and became a customs supervisor in Asia, where several cities honoured him with statues inscribed: ‘To an Honest Tax-gatherer’. He later turned banker in Switzerland, and there died, leaving a wife, Vespasia Polla, and two sons, Sabinus and Vespasian. Sabinus, the elder, attained the rank of City Prefect at Rome; Vespasian became Emperor. Vespasia Polla belonged to a good family from Nursia. Vespasius Pollio, her father, had three times held a colonelcy and been Camp Prefect; her brother entered the Senate as a praetor. Moreover, on a hilltop some six miles along the road to Spoleto, stands the village of Vespasiae, where a great many tombs testify to the family’s antiquity and local renown. As for the popular account of their origins—that the Emperor’s great-grandfather had been a foreman of the Umbrian labourers who cross the Po every summer to help the Sabines with their harvest, and that he married and settled in Reiti—my own careful researches have turned up no evidence to substantiate this.
2. Vespasian was born on 17 November 9 A.D., in the hamlet of Falacrina, just beyond Reiti; during the consulship of Quintus Sulpicius Camerinus and Gaius Poppaeus Sabinus, and five years before the death of Augustus. His paternal grandmother, Tertulla, brought him up on her estate at Cosa; and as Emperor he would often revisit the house, which he kept exactly as it had always been, in an attempt to preserve his childhood memories intact. On feast days and holy days, he made a practice of drinking from a little silver cup which had once belonged to his grandmother, so dear was her memory to him.
For years he postponed his candidature for the broad purple stripe of sena
torial rank, already earned by his brother, and in the end it was Vespasia Polla who drove him to take this step; not by pleading with him or commanding him as his mother, but by constant sarcastic use of the phrase ‘your brother’s footman’.90
Vespasian served as a colonel in Thrace, and when quaestorships were being assigned by lot, drew that of Crete and Cyrenaica. His first attempt to win an aedileship came to nothing; at the second he scraped through in only the sixth place; however, as soon as he stood for the praetorship, he was one of the most popular choices. The Senate then being at odds with Gaius Caligula,91 Vespasian, who never missed a chance of winning favour at Court, proposed that special Games should be held to celebrate the Emperor’s German victory. He also proposed that, as an additional punishment, the bodies of Lepidus and Gaetulicus,92 the conspirators, should be denied public burial; and, during a full session of the House, acknowledged the Emperor’s graciousness in having invited him to dine at the Palace.
3. Meanwhile, Vespasian had married Flavia Domitilla, the ex-mistress of Statilius Capella, an African knight from Sabrata. Her father, Flavius Liberalis, a humble quaestor’s clerk from Ferulium, had appeared before a board of arbitration and established her claim to the full Roman citizenship, in place of only a Latin one. Vespasian had three children by Flavia, namely Titus, Domitian, and Domitilla; but Domitilla died before he held a magistracy, and so did Flavia herself; he then took up with Caenis, his former mistress and one of Antonia’s freedwomen secretaries, who remained his wife in all but name even when he became Emperor.
4. On Claudius’s accession, Vespasian was indebted to Narcissus for the command of a legion in Germany; and proceeded to Britain,93 where he fought thirty battles, subjugated two warlike tribes, and captured more than twenty towns, besides the entire Isle of Wight. In these campaigns he served at times under Aulus Plautius, the Consular commander, and at times directly under Claudius, earning triumphal decorations; and soon afterwards held a couple of priesthoods, as well as a consulship for the last two months of the year. While waiting for a proconsular appointment, however, he lived in retirement: for fear of Agrippina’s power over Nero, and of the animosity which she continued to feel towards any friend of Narcissus’s even after his death.