The Twelve Caesars (37 page)

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.

A plan that he should abdicate, the first in our story, came to nothing. It was spearheaded by Sabinus and promised the emperor 100 million sesterces and a country estate in return for a
peaceful handover of power. It failed, in Tacitus’ account, thanks to a spectacular
coup de théâtre
inadvertently engineered by none
other than
Vitellius himself. On 18 December, surrounded by his family, his household and his soldiers and himself dressed in mourning, Vitellius appeared in the Forum. He explained the course he had decided
upon,

Neither consul nor citizens would accept his symbolic surrender. When Vitellius moved away to return the insignia of office to the Temple of Concord, his path was blocked. Only
the road to the palace remained open. In a state of bewilderment, Vitellius returned to his gilded cage. It was the opposite of what he had intended. Once, in a province of the north, soldiers had
made him emperor. Now they forced him to keep faith with that pact.

With Vitellian forces defeated everywhere bar Rome, it represented a moment of crisis. Sabinus pressed the emperor to honour their agreement. But Vitellius was powerless. Action belonged to the
soldiers and they seized the initiative in startling fashion, besieging the Capitoline Hill where Sabinus had taken refuge and burning to the ground the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Sabinus
himself was taken prisoner and killed; Vespasian’s younger son Domitian escaped. Reprisals were swift once Primus’ men reached Rome. Vitellius fled the palace in a litter carried by
kitchen slaves, his destination
a house belonging to his wife on the Aventine. Too late he changed his mind. He returned to the palace, which everyone else had now deserted.
The price of vacillation was his life.

Through the corridors of the empty palace limped this bulky man with the crushed upper leg, his chariot-racing injury and the first wound dealt him by the principate. As in the
case of Gaius before him, in whose company he had sustained that injury, the ancient biographer’s image of the emperor of Rome haunting the corridors of his own palace in search of peace and
succour is a disturbing one. It will end badly for Vitellius, we know.

He has chosen to put on a ragged and filthy tunic by way of disguise. Concealed around his waist is a belt filled with gold pieces. Now he hides in the only place he can find safe enough to
conceal him till darkness falls. The room is small and foul-smelling: here palace guard dogs take their rest. Vitellius lies down with them, barricading the door against intruders with a couch and
a mattress. His thoughts are not of sleep but of his escape under cover of night to Tarracina, where his brother has promised him safety. It is not to be. When, inevitably, he is discovered by
enemy soldiers who have stormed the palace, the foul-smelling tunic is gashed with blood. For the dogs have bitten him, those denizens of his own house. He attempts to dissemble, pretending that he
is not Vitellius, not the emperor. The soldiers are not deceived. They tie a noose around his neck and bind his hands behind his back. Like a dog they lead him away from the palace and through the
streets of Rome towards the Staircase of Wailing, where he is tortured and beheaded. ‘And yet I was your emperor,’ he offers, the same claim which
minutes earlier
he had denied. In truth, Vitellius was and was not emperor of Rome, a stopgap figurehead briefly exalted by conflict, afterwards consumed by the dogs of war.

Vespasian
: Titus Sabinus Vespasianus, Roman emperor, Mary Evans Picture Library

I
t began in the cauldron of civil war and ended in the cold douches of a provincial watering hole. In between, the reign of
Vespasian of the Flavii, Suetonius’ ‘unexpected’ emperor, eschewed both fire and ice. Level-headed and continent, disinclined to rashness, alert to cheats and jocular in the face
of his own well-publicized miserliness, this tenth Caesar – acclaimed only on the cusp of his sixtieth birthday – restrained extravagance and licentiousness where he found it. He did so
without personal compromise. These details alone, assuming that they are true, distinguish him from his immoderate predecessors and account for his success where Galba, Otho and Vitellius had
spectacularly failed.

‘The fox changes his fur, but not his nature,’ an irate yokel taunted him. And so, to Vespasian’s credit, it proved to be. Under the Julio-Claudian heirs of Augustus and those
would-be emperors of 69, that tag applied to the principate itself, emperor succeeding emperor, a shift in iconography, overweening fallibility consistently a hallmark. The decade of
Vespasian’s rule marks a watershed. Rome changed: luxury was checked, aristocratic grandeur replaced by circumspection and, on the Palatine, a culture more prosaic. This affable,
strong-limbed soldier, piously devoted to the memory of his grandmother, observed a monthly fast day and, with equal assiduousness, the state of Rome’s
coffers, and
remained for the most part apparently impervious to the corruptions of office. The nameless concubines with whom at intervals he shared his bed were rewarded with bulging purses of sesterces
– payments the emperor could well afford – but denied the influence of former imperial women. (Save in the matter of Vespasian’s mistress Caenis selling offices and imperial
decisions, a rumour recorded by Cassius Dio,
¹
who added that Vespasian himself happily profited from such a trade, the majesty of Flavian women was circumscribed. Confined to hairdressing, it
survives in the ziggurat arrangements of stiff, liquorice-allsorts curls which decorate the sculpted busts of first-century princesses.) The army’s emperor – like Galba, Otho and
Vitellius before him, as Suetonius takes care to point out – Vespasian reconstituted the senate and wooed its members with courtesy, on the surface punctilious and attentive, but never lost
sight of first loyalties. Effectively omnipotent, this provincial-knight-made-good massacred Latin vowels but spared the majority of Romans. Such mildness is remarkable in our chronicle. Equally
remarkable in Suetonius’ reckoning, it emerged from a house of no distinction – without the loftiness of that patrician sense of entitlement which, in Augustus’ successors, had
valued at naught suffering, iniquity or even workaday diligence; different even from the families of Otho and Vitellius. Fine words have been expended in Vespasian’s name. Not least, that in
ending civil war, he cleansed the entire world of its madness. Like all victories – and few can have inspired such a paean – it came with a price tag: according to Cassius Dio, some
50,000 casualties.