The Twelve Caesars (31 page)

Galba’s seven-month reign was too short for such far-reaching reform. It did, however, permit a policy which demonstrates a similar willingness to deprive its victims of entitlements they
considered rightfully their own. Nero’s shadow lay long over Galba’s reign – his profligacy and ill discipline, his un-Roman enfranchisement of elements of society which had no
place on the Palatine: actors and artists, Greeks, freedmen, sexual exhibitionists, narcissists, gluttons and popinjays. Most of all, Nero’s extravagance offended Galba. He estimated that
Nero had squandered in presents 2,200 million sesterces, a sum sufficiently exorbitant in conjunction with the cost of recent civil disturbance to empty the imperial treasury. Galba’s
response was simple: the gifts must be returned. He devised a strategy which permitted recipients to keep a tenth part of their ill-gotten gains. The remainder would be collected by a new bureau of
knights, thirty in Tacitus’ account, fifty according to Suetonius. Where recipients were unable to satisfy these repayments (because the money had been spent or items sold or passed on), the
recipients at one remove were also liable for restitution. Tacitus commends the plan’s fairness. Its short-term effect was chaos and widespread insolvency. Across Rome auctions proliferated;
a flooded market realized paltry prices. The treasury was not replenished. It is hard to see who benefited save those carpet-baggers with an eye to a bargain, Vinius chief among them if we believe
Plutarch’s version of events. ‘The business had no limits but was far extended and affected many; it gave the emperor himself a bad name and brought
envy and
hatred upon Vinius as having made the emperor ungenerous and sordid with everybody else,’ Dio comments.
¹³
This unpopular but high-profile policy did nothing to shore up Galba’s ebbing
support. Instead, to a disaffected soldiery were added those remaining adherents of Nero. In the senate house, an encroachment of doubts concerning the emperor’s good sense and political
acumen.

No equivalent of political correctness emasculated Roman humour. The Atellan farces exploited the old, the fat and the silly, each embraced in the open season of Roman ribaldry.
Galba’s age, we have seen, concerns the ancient sources. Their preoccupation was not with the comedy value of the emperor’s advancing years nor an anxiety for his wellbeing. The
significance of Galba becoming emperor at seventy-two, a greater age then than now, lies in the implications for Rome and the Empire of physical and mental infirmity and any diminishing of the
faculties on the part of its supreme governor. Of questionable constitution and preoccupied with the transmission of his legacy, Augustus had spent much of his reign resolving the succession. In
the case of Galba, at the beginning of his reign approaching Augustus’ age at death, the question was doubly urgent. Although Augustus had a single daughter, Julia, his choice of successors
potentially drew on a wide pool which included Julia’s children, the children and grandchildren of Augustus’ second wife Livia, and the grandchildren of his sister Octavia. The two sons
born of Galba’s marriage to Aemilia Lepida had died many years earlier, making his decision less straightforward. It was nevertheless a significant decision for Rome as well as for Galba
– although
events would prove that the emperor had failed to anticipate fully the nature of that significance to himself.

Unfinished business set in train the final descent. In 68 the legions of the Rhine had made clear their support for Verginius Rufus. Galba’s summary promotion to office
did not inspire a volte-face. For obvious reasons, the new emperor did not make amends by rewarding the German troops for their part in suppressing Vindex’ revolt. Yet whatever Galba’s
personal feelings, the reward for duty done was merited by custom and practice. It was one more offence with which to tar Galba’s name.

Something of the degree of discontent among the provinces’ seven legions was revealed to Vitellius on his arrival in Lower Germany in November. Within less than two months that discontent
would manifest itself in aggressive action. Tacitus credits the procurator of Belgica, Pompeius Propinquus, with informing Galba’s government that ‘the legions of Upper Germany had
broken through the obligations of their military oath and were demanding another emperor’.
¹⁴
At the beginning of January, soldiers responded to Flaccus’ insistence that they renew the
oath of loyalty to Galba, an annual requirement, with an oath to the senate. The Fourth Legion went further and toppled the emperor’s statues. With a greater understanding than Galba of the
source of ultimate power, they resolved, Suetonius relates, ‘to send a deputation to the Praetorians with the following message: that the emperor created in Spain did not suit them and the
Guard must choose one who would be acceptable to all the armies’. It would not be the first time the Praetorians had created an emperor. The circumstances
surrounding
Gaius’ murder and Claudius’ accession almost thirty years before had a surreptitious quality: in the case of Galba’s replacement, the soldiers’ message suggests that the
time for circumspection is past. No one any longer doubted the army’s power in emperor-making.

Except, at the eleventh hour, Galba himself. Ill winds from Germany convinced the emperor that the question of the succession must be settled at once. What is less clear is whether Galba
realized the extent of feeling against him nurtured by these same Rhine legions. Certainly not in Suetonius’ account, where Galba interprets dissent as originating from the soldiers’
anxiety about his childlessness. He summoned a council to debate the matter. Predictably his ‘tutors’ pulled him in different directions, each swayed by his own ulterior motive. Galba
overlooked the obvious candidate, Marcus Salvius Otho, that governor of Lusitania who had been first to support his bid for power. Given Otho’s ambition and the pains he had taken to
cultivate universal good opinion, Galba would pay heavily for this oversight. Fatal indeed was his choice of a humourless thirty-something aristocratic exile without
auctoritas
, renown or
military experience. Lucius Calpurnius Piso Licinianus was distinguished by a stern moroseness and an exalted family tree, both akin to Galba’s own. His character may have resembled that of
the middle-aged Tiberius, adopted by Augustus. But Galba’s adoption of Piso betrayed none of the half-heartedness and reservations of that earlier adoption. Unfortunately for Galba, nor did
Piso possess Tiberius’ undoubted qualifications for empire. The emperor first announced his decision to the Praetorians. Above the soldiers’ camp, thunder and lightning tore a glowering
sky. Rain gashed air heavy with forebodings. Galba’s news was greeted with perfunctory cheering. Few present can have known that, even at this high-water mark in
his
fortunes, Piso stood not first in line to the throne but third. To the north, the legions of Lower Germany had not waited for Galba’s deliberations but nominated a
princeps
of their
own, their commander Aulus Vitellius. Nearer home, fired by jealousy, a one-time ally was hell-bent on revenge. Otho had no intention of abiding by the decision of Galba and his
‘tutors’.

He grasped his chance on 15 January. That morning he was the only senator to attend the emperor at his sacrifice, for Galba suspected nothing. Not even when a soothsayer warned that danger was
very close at hand did his thoughts turn to Otho. And so a second-rate coup, badly organized and limited in scope, removed that emperor who had been the provincial governors’ riposte to the
folly of the last of the Julio-Claudians. Galba was killed in the Forum, amid scenes of confusion and panic, toppled from his litter accidentally, slain where he fell. The shower of blades
continued to rain down long after life had departed that twisted body. Piso died too, dragged from the Temple of Vesta and decapitated. Belatedly, as Otho’s forces grabbed the upper hand,
emperor and heir had announced payment of the donative Galba would not have paid under happier circumstances. It was too late. Abandoning their milch cow, Vinius, Laco and Icelus struggled to flee,
as unworthy of Galba’s trust now as at any point in his fleeting premiership. Vinius was cut down as he ran, stabbed from behind. Laco and Icelus perished later, the latter crucified.

Portents foretold this grizzly end (impossible that they should resist). As Galba made his autumn journey to Rome, a sacrificial ox, half-butchered and bleeding, furiously broke free of its
bonds and charged the old man’s carriage. Animated by agony, it stamped and kicked; it showered Galba with blood. The emperor dismounted his carriage and narrowly avoided being impaled on the
lance of one of his own guards. Three
months later, both pelting by blood and danger from his inner circle were realized in full. Galba’s death possessed something of
that nobility his politics had lacked. Humbled on the ground, he offered his neck without resistance or fear to the soldiers who surrounded him. His final command was curt and clear: that they
strike him where he knelt, in keeping with their will.

Otho
: Marcus Salvius Otho Roman emperor, Mary Evans Picture Library