The Twelve Caesars (35 page)

I
n place of pride, envy, covetousness, wrath and even lust (a weakness he put behind him in manhood), the emperor Vitellius
espoused gluttony and sloth. This career flatterer, through whose veins coursed the blood of artisans, shopkeepers and ne’er-do-wells (a cobbler, a baker, an informer and a carpet-bagger), was
of ‘an easygoing and lavish disposition’, ‘a kindly disposition’, ‘his nature... marked by simplicity and liberality’ – on this point conflicting sources
agree.

His besetting sins, Suetonius tells us, ‘were luxury and cruelty’, a delight ‘in inflicting death and torture on anyone whatsoever and for any cause whatever’. The author
provides examples but no names and few details, testimony that cannot be verified. Aside from the unedifying suggestion that Vitellius starved his mother to death in order to fulfil a trumpery
prediction (not even the utterance of an oracle) ‘that he would rule securely and for a long time, but only if he should survive his parent’, there is more evidence of the former
weakness than the latter. Undoubtedly he possessed a gift for tactlessness and blunt speaking, cruelty after a fashion. His dismissal of Otho’s unpretentious tomb – a small mausoleum
for a small man – did not impress his contemporaries and continues to alienate modern readers. Ditto his tasteless statement on the battlefield of Otho’s defeat, rancid with
forty-day-old unburied
corpses, ‘that the odour of a dead enemy was sweet and that of a fellow citizen sweeter still’. Such lapses probably occupied him less than
that addiction enumerated by Dio: luxury and licentiousness. His fecklessness took the form of prodigality, heedless of the economic depredations to Rome’s treasury of a year of civil
war.

For reasons that do not survive, Vitellius was the first of Rome’s emperors to reject the senate’s award both of the title ‘Augustus’ and of the name
‘Caesar’.
¹¹
Instead, describing himself as ‘
imperator
’, he had assumed already the surname
‘Germanicus’, itself formerly in the gift of the senate. It was awarded by the army which had made him emperor – the legions of Upper and Lower Germany – and labelled him as
surely as any brand applied to criminal or cattle.

Consistently denigrated by Flavian propaganda, Vitellius nevertheless does not rank high among the villains of imperial Rome: his indolence saw to that. Tacitus claims that ‘he was more
than content to enjoy the present hour with no thought beyond’.
¹
It was a harmless inclination save in one entrusted with the direction of the world’s mightiest empire at a moment of
danger and irresolution which demanded a second Augustus or at least a bureaucrat of Tiberius’ cool stamp. He was ‘naturally without energy’,
²
politically moderate and entirely
ignorant of military affairs – so far, remarkably like Otho. Most of all, he was consumed by the diktats of what Suetonius labels his ‘bottomless gullet’: more assiduous in
pursuit of a full belly than in restoring Rome’s solvency, army discipline or senatorial
morale; and too sluggish in his efforts to create a broad support base for his
rule. Dio insists that he drained the treasury of 900 million sesterces, a suggestively exaggerated figure: in a period of civil unrest, all of it was spent on dinners. (A silver serving dish so
large that a special furnace was built in open fields for its manufacture reportedly cost a million sesterces.)

By Roman standards he was tall. It was his sole eminence. His face was red with overindulgence, his body a bulging, bulbous excrescence. He walked with a limp, not on account of the burdens of
obesity but thanks to a shattered thigh received in a chariot-race alongside the emperor Gaius. Hard to discern in the balloon-faced torpor of his portrait corpus the delicious young boy who had so
tempted and delighted the ageing Tiberius that he earned the moniker ‘Sphinctria’, ‘sphincter artist’, a name that speaks for itself. It cannot have been an enviable youth,
stained, as Suetonius describes it, ‘by every sort of baseness’. Perhaps an ambitious father put him up to it: certainly it was the career of Vitellius senior, called Lucius, which
benefited in the first instance from his son’s hard submission on Capri. (Lucius Vitellius held three consulships under Claudius, with whom, like Otho’s father, he was closely
associated. Such was the intimacy of emperor and senator that it was Lucius Vitellius who, alongside Narcissus, accompanied Claudius’ return to Rome after news emerged of Messalina’s
‘marriage’ to Silius.) Dio dismisses the seven months of Vitellius’ premiership as ‘nothing but a series of carousals and revels’.
³
It is an echo of Tacitus’
taunt of living in the moment and suggests too something of that instinct for escapism which, discarding Nero, Romans had already decided did not fit the
princeps
’ part. We ought not
to wonder that, after such a youth, Vitellius preferred to indulge different appetites: that he did so to the detriment of efficiency and clear-sightedness was a prescription for failure.

Vitellius’ violent death has a pathos absent from much of our chronicle. Like Galba and Otho before him, he achieved in death a fleeting greatness that was never his
in life. At the eleventh hour, a fickle people deserted and derided this emperor who, when the going was good, possessed all the attributes of an affable
bon viveur
bar the mechanism that
separates amiable indulgence from sickening excess. The people’s errant faithlessness was a repeating pattern in this year of conflict and armed uncertainty as Rome struggled to move forward
in the vacuum following Nero’s suicide. Dragged through the city’s streets by soldiers, shabbily disguised and unwilling, Vitellius was exposed to the taunts and jeers of the mob. Their
complaints were not political (hardly factional), not even economic. They reserved their scorn for his bodily defects. In this interlude when gamblers tossed for the highest stakes, the ordinary
Roman did not revisit the protests of his forefathers, angered, for example, at Mark Antony’s offer to Caesar of a royal crown at the Festival of the Lupercalia: schoolboy derision replaced
convictions. They pelted him with dung and shit. They called him ‘incendiary’ and ‘glutton’. They laughed at the wreckage of his huge physique. In vain this man who had made
few claims for himself, attributing with injudicious candour the gift of empire to his troops, besought them, ‘And yet I was your emperor.’ They hacked his head from his body, severing
for ever that supercharged alimentary canal. Then they hurled his body into the Tiber on a hook, much as butchers and fishmongers handle their wares, its cumbersome passage undoubtedly accompanied
by further ribald laughter. The goddess Minerva, whom Vitellius had invoked as his protectress – and in whose name he once created a gastronomic extravaganza of stomach-churning
‘delicacy’, a ‘Shield of Minerva’ consisting of pheasant and peacock brains, pike livers, flamingoes’ tongues and lamprey milt, each
ingredient
shipped from the furthest frontiers of the Empire – declined to intervene either with omens or with obstacles.

In 1882 the unedifying spectacle of Vitellius’ last hours inspired the debut at the Paris Salon of a French history painter who would afterwards specialize in grandly scaled canvases of
ancient brutality or classical titillation. So successful was Georges Rochegrosse’s horrible painting
Vitellius Dragged through the Streets of Rome by the People
that he reprised the
composition two years later and won the prestigious Priz du Salon with his
Andromaque
, complete with severed heads, exposed breasts and lashings of blood. The action of both paintings
centres on a staircase, down which protagonists tumble in angry cascade, faces taut, garbed in acrid shadows. Bound and captive, Andromache is locked in impassioned struggle. She gestures towards a
baby, perhaps Astyanax, her son by Hector: she will never see the child again. In Vitellius’ case, all struggle is past. It is life itself which is being torn from him, but he musters no
defiance. The huge emperor is tied with rope, trussed and criss-crossed with cords like an unwieldy sacrifice. His toga has fallen from his shoulders, his neck and face are flecked with blood.
Passive and unprotesting, he awaits certain death with fear in his eyes and a blade rudely thrust beneath his chin. In its dark-hued viciousness, Rochegrosse’s unlovely image of vanished hope
and mob misrule replicates the horror of the sources. ‘You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things! O you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome,’ Marullus admonishes the crowd
in Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar
for their abandonment of Pompey. So it was with Vitellius. Perhaps in the emperor’s unseeing eyes is a glimmer of regret that troops once faithful
to him had prevented his abdication, one of the sounder policies of his short, pointless principate.

It may have been an inevitable end for this good-time Roman who had been buggered by Tiberius, raced chariots
with Gaius, gambled with Claudius and encouraged Nero in
theatrical indignity, and whose popularity as
princeps
rested on his assiduous attendance at the theatre. No matter that he declined at first the title ‘Caesar’: Julio-Claudian
credentials raised him up and dashed him down. The extravagance of his self-abandonment perpetuated into the next chapter of Rome’s imperial history the excess and extravagance of
Augustus’ heirs. According to Dio, ‘He was insatiate in gorging himself, and was constantly vomiting up what he ate, being nourished by the mere passage of the food’,
⁴
a process
repeated three or four times every day with emetics and purges as necessary, each bowel-busting banquet billed at more than 400,000 sesterces. In 69, as Vespasian would show he had realized,
prodigality was no longer the
princeps
’ proudest perquisite. Times had changed. Not Vitellius.

He was not, as we have seen, Rome’s first irresponsible emperor: Gaius and Nero were both fatigued by duty. Yet this ninth Caesar was the first to behave with consistent irresponsibility
from a position of weakness. ‘He was never so absorbed in serious business that he forgot his pleasures,’ Tacitus tells us.
⁵
The record of his reign suggests that he was seldom absorbed
in serious business at all, devoted instead to a parody of good living, befuddled and queasy while his troops, encamped on the banks of the Tiber, succumbed either to excess like his own or to
dysentery, and distant armies mobilized in the name of Vespasian. A puppet of his legions, he may never have craved the throne. It was won for him in a single battle at which Vitellius himself was
not present. But Otho’s surrender did not amount to conclusive military defeat: support remained for the three-month emperor among the population and military alike. ‘The soldiers of
the Fourteenth legion were particularly bold,’ Tacitus records, ‘declaring that they had never been defeated.’
⁶

Vitellius responded by ordering XIV
Gemina Martia Victrix
to Britain, a posting sufficiently remote to keep them from rabble-rousing in Rome; he also dispatched
another troublesome legion, I
Adiutrix
, to Spain. In other instances he appeared unaware of that sense of irresolution which characterized the year’s third rapid-fire change of regime.
The threat of the armies of the East left him apparently unconcerned – Dio describes him as going on ‘with his luxurious living’;
⁷
so too stirrings of dissent on the Rhine, which
in time increased in clamorousness. His focus was closer to home: the whirl of banquets and a new imperial guard which he formed after disbanding the Praetorians, elevating in their place 20,000
doughty German legionaries – too many soldiers in the city, badly disciplined and rapacious. When disaster threatened, he invoked the assistance of his cook and his pastry chef to smuggle him
in a litter out of his besieged palace to safety.

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.