The Twelve Caesars (33 page)

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.’
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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.