The Year of the Four Emperors and the Batavian Revolt

The Fall of Nero and the Reign of Galba68 – January 69

The dynasty of Augustus ended not in battle but in a failure of nerve propagated at the speed of rumor, and the empire then discovered, across eighteen months, what a century of the Principate had been concealing: that the state was the army's, and the army was several. The unraveling began in Gaul in March 68 with the rising of the governor Vindex — a Romanized Aquitanian noble whose program was not separatism but a decent emperor, and whose candidate was Galba, the aged legate of Hispania Tarraconensis; it should have ended at Vesontio in May, where the Rhine legions under Verginius Rufus destroyed Vindex's levies in a battle their commanders may have been negotiating to avoid — twenty thousand dead, Vindex a suicide — and where the victorious legions then offered the purple to Verginius, who refused it with a constitutional scruple the age found antique. Nero's position dissolved regardless, from the center outward: the Praetorian prefect sold the Guard to Galba's agents for a promised donative, the Senate condemned the abandoned emperor to the ancient penalty, and Nero, hiding in a freedman's villa four miles from Rome, drove a dagger into his throat with secretarial assistance and the exit-line — qualis artifex pereo, what an artist dies in me — that the hostile tradition preserved as self-indictment and posterity as epitaph. He was thirty; the line of Augustus was extinct; and the succession, for the first time, was a question with no grammar to answer it. Galba's seven months demonstrated with textbook economy how not to inherit a military monarchy: seventy-three years old, of Republican-vintage severity, he decimated a legion of Nero's marine recruits at the Milvian bridge for petitioning too vigorously, refused the Praetorians their purchased donative with the sentence — legi a me militem, non emi, I levy my soldiers, I do not buy them — that Tacitus admired as principle and recorded as suicide, and on the first of January 69 heard the legions of Upper Germany tear his portraits down and swear to the Senate and People pending a better offer. Their offer arrived within forty-eight hours, when the Lower German army proclaimed its own amiable, gluttonous legate, Aulus Vitellius; and Galba's answering stroke — the adoption of the blameless young aristocrat Piso as heir, announced to the Guard without a denarius attached — merely fixed the price of the alternative. Marcus Salvius Otho, Nero's old companion, first husband of Poppaea, and the passed-over kingmaker of Galba's own coup, bought twenty-three Speculatores of the Guard; on the fifteenth of January Galba was carried into the Forum by a false alarm engineered for the purpose, abandoned by cohorts he had refused to purchase, and butchered by the Praetorian cavalry beside the Lacus Curtius — the old man offering his neck with the words, in one tradition, strike, if it be for the good of Rome; Piso was dragged from the temple of Vesta and killed at its door; and Otho, saluted that evening, is said to have picnicked among the heads. Tacitus opened his account of the year with the verdict this compendium has already adopted as a thesis — the arcanum imperii now public, emperors could be made elsewhere than at Rome — and the remainder of the chapter is that sentence, executed.

Otho and Vitellius: The First Battle of CremonaJanuary–April 69

The war of Otho and Vitellius was fought for Italy by armies that had never seen their principals reign. The Vitellian columns crossed the winter Alps in two great bodies — Valens with the Lower Rhine's forty thousand by the western passes, Caecina with thirty thousand of the Upper army over the Great St Bernard in the snow — while Otho held Rome with the Guard, the marines, and gladiator-cohorts, sent his fleet ravaging the Ligurian coast in a campaign chiefly remembered for its atrocities against its own provincials, and awaited the Danubian legions marching to him; the strategic question of the campaign, posed by his best officers, was simply whether to refuse battle until they arrived. The Othonian command — the capable Suetonius Paulinus of the Boudican war among them — argued delay; the emperor's circle argued nerves could not stand it; and Otho, withdrawing to Brixellum and taking the Guard's edge with him, ordered the offensive that his marshals had voted against. On the fourteenth of April, at the first battle of Bedriacum — fought along the Po-side road east of Cremona, in vineyards and canal-cut ground where no line could hold its dressing — the Othonian army, marched sixteen miles that morning under commanders it suspected of treason, met the united Vitellian forces in a soldiers' battle of murderous local collisions: the First Adiutrix, marines a fortnight into their legionary eagles, took the Twenty-First Rapax's standard and killed its front-rank centurions before the veterans avenged it; the day dissolved into rout, forty thousand dead by the round tradition; and the negotiated surrender at Bedriacum next morning ended, by the year's arithmetic, its first civil war. Its distinction was supplied by the loser. Otho, at Brixellum with forces intact, the Danube legions' vanguard already arrived, and every officer urging continuation, declined — announcing to his soldiers, in the speeches Tacitus and Plutarch built from a tradition too consistent to be invented whole, that others might hold the purple longer, none should learn to leave it better, and that he would not have Roman youth die twice over for one man's estimate of himself; he spent the evening calming his household, burned his correspondence to protect Vitellius's partisans from Vitellius's victory, distributed his cash, slept — the detail every source keeps — soundly, and at dawn fell on the single dagger he had tested at his pillow. He was thirty-six, had reigned ninety-five days, and received from the tradition the epitaph of paradox the compendium prints as the year's one credit entry: that he died better than he had lived, some of his soldiers killing themselves at his pyre. Vitellius's progress south supplied the year's corresponding debit: touring the Bedriacum field a month after, amid the unburied, he answered his companions' disgust with the observation the hostile tradition nailed to him forever — that the smell of a dead enemy was sweet, and of a dead fellow-citizen sweeter.

The Flavian War: The Second Battle of Cremona and the Burning of the CapitolJuly–December 69

The Danube legions that had marched too late for Otho did not disperse their grievance, and the eastern armies now produced the year's fourth name. The proclamation was staged with financial precision — the prefect of Egypt Tiberius Alexander administering the oath to Vespasian on the first of July, Judaea's legions following on the third, Syria under Mucianus within the fortnight — and the Flavian plan was Mucianus's: hold Egypt's grain as a garrote, march overland with a picked force, and strangle Vitellius by winter. The Danube armies made the plan obsolete. Antonius Primus — legate of the Seventh Galbiana, a convicted forger restored by the civil wars, and the year's one commander of genius — swept the Balkan legions into Italy at campaigning speed against every instruction to wait, seized Verona, and when Caecina, opening the Vitellian betrayal-market early, was arrested by his own soldiers for attempting to sell them, met the Vitellian army's night counter-offensive outside Cremona on the twenty-fourth of October in the second battle of the year fought on the same haunted ground — and the strangest great battle of the Roman age: a full-scale engagement in pitch darkness, eleven legions' worth of men fighting by password and rumor down the Postumian road, standards lost and retaken unseen, soldiers recognizing brothers by voice — Tacitus fixes the war's civil horror in one such recognition, a son stripping his father's corpse — the Flavian line breaking at moonset and rebuilt by Primus with the flat of his sword, until at dawn the Third Gallica, Syrian-posted for a generation, turned east and hailed the rising sun in the Emesene manner, and the Vitellians, mistaking the salute for the cheer of arriving reinforcements, broke. The sequel Tacitus made the year's moral center: Cremona — a Latin colony of two hundred and eighty-six years, guilty of quartering the victors of April — was sacked by its countrymen for four days with a completeness the historian itemizes through averted eyes, its population butchered or auctioned until the buying of Italians was shamed off the market, its temples burned to the foundations; Primus was bathing when the fires took hold and remarked that the water was just right. The road to Rome then ran through negotiations conducted over the head of a Vitellius attempting serially to abdicate a purple the German cohorts refused to let him doff; the city prefect Flavius Sabinus — Vespasian's elder brother, the year's designated decent man — accepted a transfer of power, was besieged by the mob and the cohorts on the Capitol, and on the nineteenth of December the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the house of the Roman state since the kings, in whose sight every triumph of this compendium had terminated and whose burning even the Gauls of Book I had not achieved, went up in flames set by Roman hands nobody afterward would own; Sabinus was dragged to the Gemonian stairs and hacked apart under Vitellius's helpless gaze; the eighteen-year-old Domitian escaped in the linen of an Isis-priest — a costume the reader will find him remembering. The Flavian army stormed the city on the twentieth against the Guard's last stand at their own camp — the Praetorians of Vitellius dying at their gates to a man, the one unpurchased loyalty of the year spent on its least deserving object — and Vitellius, discovered in a doorkeeper's lodge behind a mattress, was driven at sword-point through the Forum with his head held back by the hair, pelted, made to watch his own statues fall, and cut down at the Gemonian stairs after answering one mocking tribune with the only sentence of his reign the tradition thought worth keeping: and yet I was your emperor. The Senate voted Vespasian the powers the same evening; Mucianus arrived days later to govern in his name; and the year closed with the accounting Tacitus totaled — four emperors, three civil wars, the Capitol in ashes — and with the empire's edges, which had watched the center empty itself, already moving.

The Batavian Revolt69–70

The gravest movement was on the lower Rhine, where the year's civil recruiting had armed exactly the wrong genius. The Batavians — the empire's premier auxiliary nation, exempt from tribute in exchange for soldiers, their eight cohorts the army's stormtroops from the Medway to Mona — had grievances (the cohorts' veterans' insults, a press-gang levy seizing, Tacitus specifies, the tribe's boys for barracks vice) and a prince: Julius Civilis, twenty-five years an auxiliary officer, one-eyed like the Sertorius he consciously played, twice arrested on treason charges and surviving, who in the autumn of 69 raised the Rhine mouth for Vespasian — the Flavians' own agents soliciting exactly this diversion — and then, as Rome burned its Capitol, converted the diversion into the war it had pretended to be. The insurgent order of battle was the Roman system inverted: the eight Batavian cohorts, recalled toward Italy, wheeled north and joined him entire; the auxiliary regiments of the whole frontier followed by nations; two legions caught in the field were wrecked, and the survivors of the Rhine army — the same legions that had made Vitellius, now leaderless, unpaid, and despised — were penned into Vetera. The siege of Vetera ran all winter into the spring of 70, past the eaten grass and roots Tacitus records, past a relief army's mutinies, into the sequence that made the revolt the century's darkest mirror: the Gallic commanders Classicus and Tutor of the Treveri and the Lingones' Julius Sabinus, reading in the Capitol's ashes (the Druids had so construed it, Tacitus reports) the transfer of heaven's mandate, proclaimed an imperium Galliarum — an empire of the Gauls with Roman forms, Roman-titled officers, and a Roman-style oath; and the starving legions of Vetera, offered terms, marched out under pledge, were plundered and massacred at the fifth milestone, and the survivors — with the remnant garrisons of the whole province — swore allegiance to the Gallic empire: two eagles serving a foreign flag, the deepest formal disgrace in the army's history, exceeding Caudium and the Teutoburg because it was sworn. The recovery was Flavian order restored at Flavian speed: nine legions converged under Petillius Cerialis — the Ninth's mauled legate of the Boudican war, now the dynasty's fireman — who broke the Treveri at Rigodulum and Trier, retook the oath-stained legions into the line with a deliberate amnesty and a speech Tacitus composed as the imperial counter-manifesto to Calgacus (Gaul's choice, Cerialis argues, was never freedom or empire, but this empire or other masters; the peace of the legions is bought with the taxes that pay them), survived a night-infiltration of his own camp that cost the fleet its flagship, and pressed Civilis down the island of the Batavians through the amphibious autumn campaign of 70 until, with his people's lands flooded and his allies bidding him in for terms, the one-eyed prince met Cerialis on a severed bridge over the Nabalia river, each on his own broken end above the water — and there, mid-sentence in Civilis's speech of self-exculpation, the manuscript of the Histories breaks off forever: the war's settlement (the Batavians restored to their old treaty, tribute-free and soldier-bound; the fate of Civilis unknown) reconstructed from allusion, the compendium's most consequential torn page. The Editor closes the chapter on the double lesson the year and its sequel taught every reign that follows in this volume and the next: that the frontier armies now knew their price, and the frontier peoples now knew the frontier armies — and that the Flavian reconstruction, treated in the next chapter, was engineered, intelligently and admittedly too late, against both halves of that knowledge at once.