69 AD: The Year of Four Emperors Read online

  69 A.D.

  69 A.D.

  The Year of Four Emperors

  GWYN MORGAN

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Morgan, Gwyn, 1937–

  69 A.D. : the year of four emperors / Gwyn Morgan

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-19512468-2

  ISBN-10: 0-19-512468-5

  1. Rome—History—Civil War, 68–69.

  2. Galba, Servius Sulpicius, Emperor of Rome, 3 B.C.–69 A.D.

  3. Otho, Marcus Salvius, Emperor of Rome, 32–69.

  4. Vitellius, Aulus, Emperor of Rome, 15–69.

  5. Vespasian, Emperor of Rome, 9–79.

  I. Title.

  DG286.M64 2005 937'.05—dc22 2005047271

  Maps created by Chris Williams

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  Printed in the United States of America

  on acid-free paper

  Dis Manibus

  S. S. Michaels W. F. Jackson Knight H. A. Murray

  Acknowledgments

  Over the years many friends and colleagues have given me help, advice, and encouragement. So too have many students, graduate and undergraduate. To single out individuals would be invidious, but to all of them I express my deepest appreciation. There are three people, however, to whom I owe particular debts: Chris Williams for drawing the maps that will, I hope, make the narrative easier to follow; Thomas Le Bien, formerly of Oxford University Press, for his help in getting this project launched; and Susan Ferber, his successor as my editor at the Press, for suffering so much with such equanimity during the book’s lengthy and often painful gestation. Finally, there are the three men to whom the book is dedicated. To them I owe the profoundest gratitude for having pounded into me, many years ago, the need to develop at least some feeling for literature to balance my fascination with history.

  Contents

  List of Maps

  Introduction

  1 The Fall of Nero and the Julio-Claudian House

  2 The Reign of Galba (June 68 to January 69)

  3 Adoption and Assassination (January 69)

  4 The Opening of the Vitellian Offensive (January and February)

  5 Otho Prepares for War (January and February)

  6 The War between Otho and Vitellius (March and April)

  7 The Reign of Vitellius (April to September 69)

  8 The Beginning of the End: Vespasian through August 69

  9 The Opening of the Flavian Offensive (August to October)

  10 End Game (November and December)

  Conclusion

  Appendices

  1 The Principal Sources for 68/69

  2 Characterizations of Galba and Otho

  3 Checklist of the Legions Operational in 68/69

  Notes

  Index

  Maps

  I The Provinces of the Roman Empire in 69

  II The Germanies and the French Riviera Coast

  III Northern Italy

  IV The Capitol and Its Environs 244

  69 A.D.

  The Provinces of the Roman Empire in 69

  Introduction

  The Year of the Four Emperors is the label we attach to the 18-month period that opened with the suicide of Nero in June 68 and closed with the triumph of Vespasian in December 69. In the interim three other emperors held power, if only for a few months. There was Galba, officially declared emperor in June 68 and assassinated on 15 January 69. There was Otho, the man responsible for his murder. Having seized power by a coup in Rome, he committed suicide on 16 April, in the vain hope that his death would end the bloodshed. And there was Vitellius, hailed emperor by his troops on 3 January 69, recognized by the senate in Rome once they heard of Otho’s death, and cut down by Vespasian’s partisans on 20 December. Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and Vespasian were usurpers, of course, whereas Nero had been the legitimate emperor, the last male member of the Julio-Claudian dynasty established by Augustus a century earlier. In retrospect it is easy to make Vespasian’s victory look inevitable. In fact, it owed an enormous amount to accident and luck. But Vespasian was a practical, hard-headed man, disinclined to look gift-horses in the mouth, and his dynasty, the Flavians, would rule the Roman world for 27 years.

  Why write a book about all this, especially when, in the past century, there have been three full-length studies in English, by Henderson, Greenhalgh, and Wellesley? The answer revolves around the conflict between what the evidence says and the conclusions we can legitimately draw from it. It is a conflict that has bedeviled historians ever since the events took place. Tacitus, for example, our fullest source, had no qualms about denigrating his predecessors’ works on the Year of the Four Emperors and the Flavian dynasty. Even as he plundered them for material, he asserted that they were all unreliable because written from a faulty perspective, and that the record needed to be set straight. One can still claim to be trying to set the record straight, since any new study of a period should rest on the proposition that previous works on the subject are flawed by shortcomings of some kind. It would be inexcusable as well as unjustifiable to dismiss the work of earlier scholars in the Tacitean manner, but Henderson, Greenhalgh, and Wellesley—for all their many virtues—failed to handle the evidence adequately.

  Bernard W. Henderson’s Civil War and Rebellion in the Roman Empire was published in 1908, when Europe was awash in studies of the changing nature of warfare in light of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 (the significance of the American Civil War was largely missed or ignored). So Henderson set out to reconstruct the military history of 68/69, to make sense of the confused and contradictory narratives of the ancient sources, and to introduce the latest insights into the study of Roman campaigning. The results varied. His interpretation of the war between Otho and Vitellius proved to be overcomplicated and anachronistic, and was criticized savagely by his peers. But as they also observed, the rest of the book is much sounder. It has the comic-opera air of a work composed by “a very modern major-general,” referring as it does frequently to the long-forgotten little wars of the Victorian period. Yet its author was no fool. On many points Henderson has proved a more incisive critic than his successors, and his book deserves a better fate than to have become a collector’s item among military buffs, as eager as are their detractors to believe that military thinking has stood still for two millennia.

  Since the fascination exerted by one period of history or
another waxes and wanes according to the temper of the times, nearly 70 years elapsed before two more studies appeared. Both were published in 1975, and both focused on the overall picture, as Henderson had not—but to very different ends. P. A. L. Greenhalgh’s The Year of Four Emperors was an overtly popular study, told almost as if it were one of the “ripping yarns” on which British schoolboys were reared in the days of Empire. Stitching together a lively and seamless narrative on “one of the most exciting, bloody, colourful, critical, absorbing, best documented and least well-known episodes in the whole of Roman history,” Greenhalgh drew his material principally—and as a rule uncritically—from Tacitus’ Histories. The results are eminently readable, but they do little to advance our understanding of the realities of 68/69. Tacitus is too difficult and demanding an author to permit our taking his narrative at face value. Much as there is to be said for the machete-wielding popularizer who hacks a path through the jungle of academic theories, interminable discussions, and innumerable footnotes, the path tends to lead nowhere or back to its starting point.

  Kenneth Wellesley’s The Long Year: A.D. 69, conversely, has proved the most durable of these monographs, to judge by the number of times it has been reprinted. Wellesley was a scholar who devoted much of his life to the study of Tacitus, and his book was preceded (and followed) by a long string of learned papers in which he addressed specific problems raised by our sources. The result was a more comprehensive narrative, even if overly preoccupied with matters of topography (apparently Wellesley had served in Military Intelligence). Some also find it less reader friendly. But the real problem lies in the fact that though Wellesley dedicated his book to the shades of Tacitus, his study of the Histories convinced him not merely that Tacitus could seldom be trusted, but also that he went out of his way to distort the evidence. Hence The Long Year rests on an interpretation in which the Tacitean evidence is regularly doubted or dismissed in favor of material from our other sources, Plutarch above all (hence a portrait of a kinder, gentler Galba). So Wellesley went to the opposite extreme from Greenhalgh, in method and in results: Greenhalgh trusted Tacitus too much, Wellesley too little.

  As a first step, therefore, let me say that one overall aim of this study is to offer an account of the Year of the Four Emperors that rests on a fresh scrutiny of the evidence and, in particular, steers a course that grants Tacitus more credit than Wellesley allowed him but less than Greenhalgh accorded him. This is important, because it is not just Tacitus’ evidence for the upheavals of 68/69 that cannot be taken at face value. None of it can. The most eye-catching artifacts to have come down to us, for example, the coins struck by the emperors, remain our least helpful guides to specific events despite all the work devoted to them by numismatists. For a start, Roman coinage was not struck on any systematic basis at this stage. There would be a flurry of issues at the start of a new reign, but then the flow tapered off. Again, it was usual to strike in gold, silver, and bronze (for small change), but Otho issued only gold and silver coins, since Nero and Galba between them had pumped huge quantities of bronze into circulation. Then there is the fact that we cannot prove that the emperor in whose name a coin was minted was the person who picked the design. And finally, while it would make sense to assume that Vitellius, say, personally chose the legend for an issue honoring “the loyalty of the legions,” we cannot always determine whether such a legend referred to past events, present concerns, or hopes for the future. Obviously, the minting authority was conveying some kind of general message, and apparently the consumer was supposed to swallow this message without demur, but that is about all we can say.1

  Rather more can be gleaned from archaeology, epigraphy, and papyrology. In 1887, for example, archaeologists recovered the bronze facing to the military chest of the Vitellian legion IV Macedonica, the container for the troops’ savings. Found some 50 meters outside the walls of Cremona, the chest must have been dropped or abandoned during the Flavian assault on the Vitellians’ position in October 69. Then there are inscriptions, ranging from dedications to the gods made by two soldiers who took part in Caecina’s march through the Alps in March 69 all the way up to the so-called law on Vespasian’s powers (lex de imperio Vespasiani). A large bronze tablet found in Rome in the fourteenth century, this preserves the concluding sections of a law passed once the fighting had ended. Not only does it spell out Vespasian’s rights and prerogatives for the future. Its final clause also legalizes every action taken by him and his subordinates between 1 July 69, when he was proclaimed emperor by his troops in the eastern provinces, and 21 December, when his claim to the throne was officially recognized by the senate in Rome. As for the papyri, the most important of these is the text of an edict issued in Alexandria on 6 July 68 by the prefect of Egypt, Tiberius Julius Alexander, to announce his acceptance of Galba as the legitimate emperor.

  Important as such documents are, they tend to create as many problems as they solve. Tiberius Alexander’s edict, for instance, has prompted an inordinate amount of speculation, because it throws a flood of light on one matter, and yet raises a series of questions about the relationship between that matter and other events. Besides, these are random discoveries, and so do not and cannot give us the material to construct an account that ties together all the bits and pieces of information. For that kind of framework we must turn to the surviving literary sources, of whom there are five, two Roman (Tacitus and Suetonius), two Greek (Plutarch and Dio Cassius), and one Jewish (Josephus). I have relegated to appendix 1 the questions who these men were, when they wrote, and what they wrote about. The point to be emphasized here is that each of the five provides only partial coverage, since each chose to write what he wrote from a particular perspective, in a particular manner, to suit a particular purpose.

  A good illustration is provided by the tale of what happened when Galba left the palace on 15 January 69, the last day of his life, to confront the usurper Otho. On his way out he ran into a ranker named Julius Atticus, who was brandishing a bloody sword and claiming loudly to have killed Otho. Galba responded by asking Atticus who had given him his orders. The story was undoubtedly told to highlight Galba’s question, since he was a notorious martinet, who deplored any sign of initiative or independent thinking by others. Yet there are four different versions of the incident, from Plutarch, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Dio. None of them is much interested in Atticus’ motives for lying, but they take Galba’s question in four different ways. Plutarch, the best disposed toward the emperor, misses the point or deliberately defuses the effect of the question by having Atticus respond that he had acted “out of loyalty and the oath he had sworn,” a declaration greeted with applause and shouts of approval from the bystanders. The other three writers focus on Galba’s question and, as Philippe Fabia put it, for Tacitus, the emperor’s behavior illustrates his intransigence when faced with a breach of military discipline; for Suetonius it exemplifies his misplaced confidence that Otho’s coup was a tempest in a teapot; Dio sees only his credulity in swallowing the tale without demanding corroborative evidence like Otho’s head.2

  With a minor incident like this, we could argue that it does not matter which version we prefer or, less convincingly, we could combine all four into one by the judicious application of scissors and paste. Neither method works when the point at issue is the interpretation of the period as a whole. Here we face a double-barreled question, what exactly it is that the evidence says and just how much weight we should give to the different pieces. Can we and should we, for instance, continue to accept the widespread view, derived from Plutarch, that during the Year of the Four Emperors the Roman armed forces went berserk? As he puts it in the preface to his Life of Galba, “many terrible events, especially those that befell the Romans after Nero’s suicide, … show in exemplary fashion that a state should fear above all armed forces subject to untrained and irrational impulses. … The Roman empire was overtaken by disasters and upheavals like those caused by the Titans of mythology, at one and the same tim
e being torn into many pieces and collapsing in on itself in many places. This came about not so much because of the ambitions of the men who were proclaimed emperor, as because of the greed and indiscipline of the soldiery … who ushered one emperor into the palace and another out just like characters in a stage play.”

  Plutarch’s interpretation is a wholly artificial construct. It rests, first, on his own admission that his work was not a detailed, formal history of the period, only biographies of individual emperors. This is what allowed him to get away with the wild claim that the empire was “torn into many pieces.” Second, he granted that it was his duty to include peripheral incidents “worthy of mention,” but in order to decide which incidents these were he used the criteria of a philosopher drawing general lessons from the study of history. Third, and most important, his scenario turns on a specious antithesis between the supreme commander on the one side and the “soldiery” on the other. In a piece of rhetorical legerdemain that too few have challenged, Plutarch declared the emperors largely ciphers and their ambitions inconsequential, and he lumped the rankers together with the officers between them and the emperor. However we view the rankers, their officers were no more brutal, mercenary, and licentious than their emperors.

  Why, then, has this vision of the brutal soldiery so captivated succeeding generations? In part, it is clear, this presentation has always struck a chord with readers in countries where people suspect—justifiably or otherwise—that the armed forces are not wholly under the control of the civil authority. But it owes most of its strength to the failure of our other sources explicitly to provide an alternative conceptual framework in which to set the story. Suetonius and Dio explain Nero’s suicide simply as the consequence of his own misdeeds, and view subsequent developments as results of that suicide. Tacitus prefaces his narrative with a short survey of what he saw as the moods prevailing at the start of 69 in Rome and the provinces, of those high on the social scale and those in its lower reaches, of civilians and soldiers, enough to show that he refused to limit himself to the relationship between emperor and troops. But because he also states that events now revealed “a (not the) secret of empire, that an emperor could be made elsewhere than in Rome,” this remark has been ripped out of its context and used to support Plutarch’s scenario. In fact, Tacitus did not specify by whom any such emperors were made, clearly because he expected his readers to grasp that the process was far more complex than Plutarch would have us believe.