69 AD: The Year of Four Emperors Read online

  We know, again from Plutarch, that Galba had decided that inaction was the best way not to attract Nero’s attention. Nobody, he supposedly declared, could be called to account for things he had not done. It was a reasonable plan if, like other senators, he believed that birth, wealth, and ability were criminal charges in Nero’s eyes. He had the birth and the wealth, and he was not alone in thinking that he possessed the ability. But we should probably add pique to the mixture. Insofar as his inaction rested on the belief that he was an obvious target for Nero’s attentions, and his self-esteem would scarcely have let him think otherwise, he should also have resented Vindex’s not inviting him to head the movement from the start. Plutarch, however, asserts that Galba put no trust in the letters. This cannot mean that Galba imagined the letters to be forgeries, put out by Nero’s agents to tempt him into a fatal indiscretion, because then his failure to pass the correspondence to the authorities makes no sense. It is more plausible to hold that he rated the rebel’s chances of success so small that it was not worth taking the matter seriously. As Suetonius reports, Nero had a similar reaction when he heard that Vindex had come out openly in revolt against him.

  Since Vindex was supposedly an intelligent man, he must have suspected that some of the officials he contacted would inform Nero, and that even if nobody took the uprising seriously at first, this state of affairs could not continue indefinitely. Realistically, therefore, Vindex had either to go ahead with the revolt or to commit suicide. Since Dio asserts that his audacity was as vast as his ambition, he picked the first option. Supposedly experienced in military affairs as well, Vindex seems not to have expected armed opposition from Verginius Rufus and Fonteius Capito, the commanders of Upper and Lower Germany respectively, the two military districts that lay along the western bank of the Rhine and housed no less than seven legions. Hence the likelihood that one or both of these men had given equivocal or misleading responses to his original letters. Whatever the case, Vindex raised the standard of revolt in mid-March 68, only to find that his support was limited to ill-armed levies, drawn mostly from but 3 of the 64 tribes in Gaul, the Aedui, the Arverni, and the Sequani. Nearly 100,000 men are said to have joined him, with the prospect of thousands more, but this gave his revolt the appearance of a Gallic insurrection against Rome. And this ruled out all prospects of help from the commanders on the Rhine frontier. Their function was to defend the empire, not only against attacks by German tribes east of the river, but also against uprisings by Gauls to its west. Within two weeks Vindex was driven to the conclusion that the only way to put the revolt back on track was to interpret Galba’s silence as tacit approval of his aims, and to invite him to become its leader.

  At the start of April Galba decided to accept the offer. He did this on the urging above all of his associate Titus Vinius—or so Plutarch says. In this case he may be right, even though Plutarch does everything he can to save the reputation of the emperor by casting Vinius as Galba’s evil genius. According to Suetonius, however, Galba had another incentive, the discovery that Nero had sent secret instructions to his procurators in Tarraconensis, ordering them to assassinate its governor. This story is probably untrue, since it looks like an attempt by Galba to justify his actions by posing as a victim of Nero’s tyranny. That accords better not only with the emperor’s failure to take the revolt seriously until Galba publicly announced his decision to become its leader, but also with the carefully orchestrated scene in which Galba made the announcement. Hailed emperor by a crowd assembled for the occasion in Nova Carthago (Cartagena), he denounced Nero, stressed the number of prominent men murdered or exiled by him, and declared that he himself was acting as “lieutenant of the senate and people of Rome.” Then he proclaimed a suspension of public business, to signify that this was a time of crisis, and to enable him to drop everything else and strengthen his own position. As one of his first moves, we are told, he assembled “a kind of senate” from the oldest and most experienced of the local dignitaries. Since we never hear of this body again, and Galba at his age was in any case disinclined to listen to the advice of others, this was probably a way of guaranteeing—or compelling—their support and of satisfying appearances.

  This may explain also why there is no evidence that he dispatched anybody to sound out members of the senate. His freedman Icelus was in Rome when the news arrived that his master had accepted Vindex’s offer to head the revolt. Suetonius tells us that Nero threw the man in chains for that reason. But even if the emperor suspected Icelus of acting as an intermediary between Galba and any senators he could contact, his suspicions were probably groundless. Icelus was rounded up the moment news of Galba’s announcement of support for Vindex reached the city, and Galba’s announcement—according to our sources—followed almost immediately on his decision to rebel. Either the freedman was arrested before he could carry out his mission or, more probably, he had been sent to Italy on other business, to check on Galba’s family estates for example. Besides, no prominent senators seem to have boasted of their early support for Galba once he had become emperor, though they could then safely have done so. Nor, for that matter, do such senators figure among his choices for important positions in the new regime. In short, Galba may very well have taken it for granted that he was the best replacement for Nero, have refused to believe that senators could or would think otherwise, and have dismissed any who did as fools and traitors. This interpretation fits best with the way Galba behaved in his province and during his journey to Italy. It was conduct, as Tacitus puts it, that turned his progress from Spain to Rome into “a long and bloody march.”

  Before Galba set out, Suetonius reports, he “sent out proclamations to the provinces, urging all collectively and individually to join his movement and aid the common cause in whatever way they could.” More specific appeals for help were sent to officials in the two other provinces into which Spain was divided, Lusitania (Portugal) and Baetica (Andalusia), and from them he was able to raise some of the money he needed to fund his activities. The rest he secured by appropriating the revenues from all imperial properties in Tarraconensis. With this in hand he was able to take care of the most important business of all, raising troops. To begin with, he had at his disposal only one legion, VI Victrix, three auxiliary cohorts, and two squadrons of cavalry (one squadron, interestingly, tried unsuccessfully to desert). So Galba conducted a levy and put together a second legion, VII Galbiana. Another levy was held in the territory of the Vascones (Basques), and this raised two more cohorts of auxiliary infantry. On paper Galba almost doubled the number of troops under his command.

  What Galba most certainly did not do was march to the aid of Vindex. Quite possibly his preparations took well over a month to complete. Or he may have fancied that Vindex could be left to his own devices. If so, he was wrong. The revolt in Gaul was characterized by one farcical episode after another, and this may not be the result solely of the inadequacies of Dio, our main source for the details. Vindex had to begin by laying siege to his own provincial capital, Lugdunum (Lyon). There is nothing to indicate whether he had expected the town to shut its gates against him, but its resistance is unsurprising. For a start, its citizens were particularly devoted to Nero, since they had contributed four million sesterces to help rebuild Rome after the Great Fire of 64, and Nero had returned them the same sum when Lugdunum was devastated by fire in the following year. Again, inscriptions suggest that some of the inhabitants were veterans who had served with the legions stationed along the Rhine frontier, and they had no reason to turn on Nero. And finally, Lugdunum housed the imperial mint that struck some of the bronze issues used to pay the troops stationed in the west, and so housed an urban cohort too, cohors XVIII urbana.4 On its face, this was a negligible force, only 500 men strong, but it was an organized unit and still more likely than the veterans to remain loyal. One might imagine that Vindex, aware of all this before he began his revolt, would have taken steps to seize the city by trickery. But perhaps he thought that his own audacity
would carry the day, gambling that the townsfolk would never refuse entry to their own governor. Or perhaps he deliberately gave Lugdunum the chance to display its hostility, in order to broaden the base of his own support elsewhere. The attack on the town won him the enthusiastic support of the people of Vienna (Vienne) some 20 miles further down the Rhône. The other major town in the province, Vienna, had been feuding bitterly with Lugdunum for over a century, and each seized every opportunity to score off the other. Provincial towns were as prone as senators in Rome to jockey for position, no matter whether that jeopardized any larger aims they entertained.

  While Vindex laid siege to Lugdunum, the governor of Upper Germany, Lucius Verginius Rufus, mustered the forces to put down the revolt. From his own district he took the two legions stationed in Mogontiacum (Mainz), IV Macedonica and XXII Primigenia. To these he added detachments from the four legions in Lower Germany. This yielded some 20,000 legionaries, and auxiliaries—probably as many in number—accompanied them as a matter of course. This was ample for the task, since Romans were convinced that a legionary was worth ten or more of any enemy, and none would have been alarmed by reports that Vindex had collected 100,000 rebels. Why Verginius drew troops from both military districts is another question. It might seem tempting to argue that it would have been foolish for him to strip every soldier from the frontiers of his own, and so leave it exposed to attacks by the German tribes beyond the Rhine. But pulling the two legions out of Mogontiacum left a gaping hole in the defenses anyway, and this hole could be plugged neither quickly nor easily by his third legion, XXI Rapax, stationed miles to the south at Vindonissa (Windisch in Switzerland), near the river’s head waters. More likely Verginius thought it simpler and faster to assemble detachments of V Alaudae and XV Primigenia at Vetera (Xanten), XVI at Novaesium (Neuss), and I Germanica at Bonna (Bonn), than it was to summon XXI Rapax to his aid. This proved to be a mistake, however, or so Tacitus says. Contacts between the legions stationed in the two Germanies had been few and far between. Each unit nursed its own grievances, whatever they were, unaware that others had just as many. Not that Verginius’ troops were especially unhappy—as yet. But many of the men in the drafts from Lower Germany were dissatisfied with their governor, Fonteius Capito, and Tacitus seems to have concluded that they spread this disaffection throughout the ranks of Verginius’ force.

  How long Verginius needed to make his preparations we do not know, but it was apparently toward the end of March that he began his advance southwest through the Belfort Gap to Vesontio (Besançon), tribal capital of the Sequani. He seems throughout the campaign to have been reluctant to fight a pitched battle, but whatever caused this, it was neither reluctance to crush the revolt nor respect for Vindex. Initially, he may have hoped to intimidate the rebels into surrender. Or perhaps he was more concerned about what would happen if he let his own men off the leash. By now the legionaries had worked themselves into a rage over a rebellion they saw as an affront to the honor of Rome. They were eager to fight too, because they anticipated an easy victory and vast amounts of plunder. As Gaul was the richest province in the west, it promised them loot in quantities they could not hope to amass by ordinary means, no matter how many punitive raids they made against the German tribes in the forests and swamps on the far side of the Rhine. So when the inhabitants of Vesontio refused to open their gates, Verginius had to put the town under siege, Vindex to come to the aid of his allies. Vindex may have left behind a force to mask Lugdunum, but the prospect of serious fighting caused many of his followers to desert. He made his way to Vesontio only with some 30,000 men.

  Vindex reached the area around the end of April, seemingly a week or so after Verginius, and according to Dio another fiasco ensued. Finding that Verginius and his troops had drawn lines around Vesontio, Vindex opened parleys with his counterpart, and eventually the two conferred without witnesses. At this meeting they agreed, “so it was conjectured,” to join forces against Nero and, on this basis, Vindex ordered his men to march into the city and take possession, presumably to indicate that the siege was over and to reassure the town’s inhabitants. Dio, however, does not specify what purpose this move was to serve. Instead, he presses on and, hard as it may be to believe, reports that Verginius’ legionaries interpreted the Gauls’ marching toward them as a sign that battle was imminent. We could assume that the legionaries were not told of the agreement, or that they refused to believe that it had been made. Then too, the commanders could have reached different conclusions about the points on which they had agreed, or Verginius could have had second thoughts once he returned to his camp. Unfortunately, we are not told what his officers thought. No matter how we explain it, Vindex’s men acted as if an agreement had been reached, Verginius’ as if it had not. “Without waiting for orders,” the legionaries attacked the rebels before they could deploy into a battle line. Plutarch tells a similar story, but predictably he stresses the helplessness of both commanders. Likening them to charioteers who lose control of their horses in a race, he has them driven by their troops into the collision of a great battle. In fact, it was a massacre. Some 20,000 Gauls are said to have been killed, Vindex committed suicide in despair, and Verginius was allegedly as disconsolate over the result as were the surviving rebels.

  The victorious legionaries now took it into their heads for the first time to proclaim Verginius emperor. This has provoked endless speculation, including Machiavellian theories to the effect that Verginius had led Vindex on and then destroyed him to ensure that he alone would determine who the next emperor should be. This is fantasy, not even palliated by claims that the skullduggery was covered up later by spin doctors who put Verginius’ conduct in a much better light. Inability to control his troops was not something a Roman general would care to have said of him. No doubt Verginius’ interpretation of his own behavior varied according to the audience to whom and the date at which it was voiced. (He was to live for another 30 years, and when he died in 97, he received an official eulogy from none other than Tacitus, consul at the time.) It signifies little that the troops retained some admiration for Verginius, since that could have been won by laxity like that shown by Lentulus Gaetulicus in 39. What counts is that Verginius had been appointed to his command because he was a mediocrity, and that he was to be so treated by Galba, by Otho, by Vitellius, and by the three Flavian emperors who followed them. This suggests that Verginius found himself out of his depth in May 68, caught off guard by a situation outside his imaginings and his experience, and neither crafty enough to manipulate the troops, nor enterprising enough to play the cards they had dealt him.

  If we look first at his rejection of the troops’ offer, Verginius—like Vindex—was a first-generation senator. He really should have known that he would be unacceptable to the governing class as a whole. The premium on ancestry, as Sir Ronald Syme put it, would fall sharply over the next 18 months, but an aristocratic pedigree had not ceased to count just yet. Besides, there was already another, better qualified candidate in the field, Galba. Yet Verginius showed no greater eagerness to endorse Galba’s claims, be it by choice or of necessity. So if he was playing kingmaker, it is hard to discern for whose benefit he took on the role. There is nothing against the idea that Verginius had doubts about Nero’s fitness to be emperor, or that his reluctance to make common cause with Galba stemmed either from reservations about the latter’s chances of success or from his own troops’ hatred of Galba (this was pronounced, as we shall see). But there is also nothing against the simpler idea that Verginius never even contemplated turning on Nero. He was one of his protégés, and many more senators remained loyal to the emperor than it was prudent to admit later. True, Verginius asserted that only the senate and people of Rome could pick a new emperor, but this was the standard phraseology for such occasions. Galba had said the same when he accepted Vindex’s offer to lead the revolt at the start of April. There seem to be only two realistic choices. Either Verginius’ response to the soldiery was a case of strict constit
utionalism or he was temporizing. It comes to the same thing: Verginius was trying simultaneously to blunt the clamor of the troops, to sidestep their anger at his rejecting their offer, and to bring them back to their allegiance, all this in a way that precluded charges of disloyalty to Nero.

  More important than Verginius’ refusing the title of emperor, however, is the troops’ making the offer in the first place. It is unwise to assume simply that the men had fallen victim to a fit of kingmaking. Although they may have taken the lead (this is the impression Plutarch tries hard to create), all the instances for which we have detailed information suggest strongly that it was their officers who were primarily responsible, capitalizing on the troops’ anxieties in order to advance their own careers. In either case, however, we have no warrant for believing the rankers disenchanted with Nero. He is often criticized for never visiting his troops, but it may have been as well, given the figure he would have cut. One of the more bizarre plans Suetonius has him consider after hearing the news that Galba had accepted leadership of the revolt was to appear unarmed before the troops and just weep. This—he declared—would induce them to repent, and he would then be able to lead the celebrations by singing paeans of victory that he ought at that very moment to be composing. In any event, the sources state explicitly that the men returned to their allegiance after Verginius refused their offer, and their readiness to do so suggests that their prime motivation was hatred, not of Nero, but of Galba. Nor is this so strange, when Galba had served for two years as commander in Upper Germany, and had spent his time on restoring discipline after the conspiracy for which Caligula had executed Lentulus Gaetulicus. In other words, the troops seem to have thought, or to have been persuaded, that if there was to be a new emperor, they would be better off with Verginius than with Galba. So while they were angered by Verginius’ refusing them, they were reassured when he too declined to support Galba. They could safely return to their allegiance to Nero. It was not a ringing endorsement of the incumbent emperor, but—to reemphasize the point—it was a long way from kingmaking for its own sake.5