At first light on 18 December a procession gathered at the palace to perform the public act of abdication. Vitellius walked down the slope to the Forum dressed in funereal grey, surrounded by his dejected household servants; and behind him his six-year-old son, the poor stutterer so proudly presented to the troops at Lyon a few months ago, was carried ominously in a small and humble litter, his last taste of the greatness his father had so often promised him. The cheers of the public were loud and ill-timed, but the Praetorian escort preserved a sullen silence. No man, however dull of heart, could have failed to feel some emotion at the scene. An emperor of Rome, so recently the acknowledged master of the civilized world, was leaving the imperial palace that had been his and was moving through the crowded streets of Rome on the road to abdication and exile. Assassination, suicide, poison and natural death were known as marking the ends of emperors. But there was something new in the obsequies of a reign celebrated in a glare of publicity by the ruler himself. Vitellius walked towards the rostrum, mounted it and came forward so that every eye rested on him.* He made a short speech similar to that delivered to the Praetorians on the previous evening, this time, however, reading from a prepared script. In the interests of peace and of his country, he said, he was abdicating a position he had from the beginning been reluctant to assume. He asked his hearers not to think ill of him, and to deal mercifully with his brother Lucius, his wife Galeria and his innocent children. As he spoke, he held up the small lad so that he could be seen, appealing both to the crowd as a whole and to individuals in it. In the end he broke down, and silently drew from his belt the ten-inch dagger (such was normally worn by the Roman infantryman), which in Vitellius served as the symbol of the commander-in-chiefs power of life and death, offering it to the consul Caecilius Simplex who was standing beside him. The magistrate refused it, and there were indignant cries of ‘No, no’ from the populace. Vitellius then retreated from the rostrum with the intention of laying down his insignia in a public building immediately behind the platform, associated with acts of state and by its very name symbolic: the Temple of Concord at the foot of the Register House. From here he would take refuge in Lucius’ residence close by. At this the shouts of protest redoubled. The crowd surged around, preventing his mounting the flight of steps to the broad pronaos of the temple and blocking all egress from the Forum. ‘You are Concord enough—go back to the palace!’ roared the crowd. Nonplussed, Vitellius retraced his steps through the Forum but at the far end was again compelled by the press of bodies to abandon his intention, which was now to make for the Aventine and his own private residence. So he went reluctantly up the sloping road that led to the forecourt of the palace. Even abdication, it seemed, was beyond his reach. For Vitellius there was to be no way of releasing the ears of the wolf without suffering its jaws.74
How he spent the following hours can only be inferred. He sent Galeria and the children away from the palace by a secret exit, but for some reason did not follow them himself. This decision to remain may have been the result of the arrival of Lucius’ message from Terracina, accompanied by the slave who had betrayed the town to Lucius. In a sudden upsurge of hope and confidence, Aulus rewarded the man with a knight’s rings. In Vitellius’ eyes the success at Terracina, coming after so many failures, shed a new light on the situation. Even if the abdication had failed, he might now exact better terms by capitulating from a position of strength. The return of the six Praetorian cohorts from Terracina to Rome could be effected by the evening of 21 December, and their presence might make Antonius readier to avoid the use of force in occupying the city. It was essential to play for time. He sent an order to Lucius to return at full speed, told the superintendent of the armoury in the Praetorian camp to issue arms to the People, who had clamoured for them, and fixed a meeting of the Senate for the following day, 19 December, to negotiate further with the Flavians.
But already, on the same morning, things had taken a surprising turn in Rome without any initiative from Vitellius. At the moment when he was making his abdication attempt in the Forum, nearly a mile away to the north-east and at a spot south of the modern Manica Lunga of the Quirinal Palace, a crowd of notables had gathered at the house of Flavius Sabinus, prefect of the city, to whom supreme responsibility had, it seemed, now passed. Among them were the other consul Quin-tius Atticus, some leading members of the Senate, a number of knights, and representatives of the units of the Urban Cohorts and the Cohorts of the Watch, both of which Sabinus commanded by virtue of his office. It was a levée with a difference. Quite apart from the desirability of paying homage to the elder brother of the new emperor, there were practical matters to be settled. The oath must be administered to all military personnel; the policing of Rome must be assured; the transfer of some senior civil functions would be necessary; and arrangements must be made for the removal of Vitellius and his family from Rome. Quintius produced some pretentiously-worded consular edicts informing the civil population of the position, and arranged for these to be published throughout the city. Suddenly the conference was interrupted. Word came that the abdication had not been carried through, that the crowds in the Forum had strongly supported the retention of Vitellius as emperor, and that the Praetorians were determined to defend a leader whose disappearance would entail their own destruction. Vitellius had accomplished nothing and returned to the palace. Among the Flavians there was consternation. But Sabinus and the rest had gone too far to retreat, and the bitter reflection that it was Vitellius who had failed to carry out his part of a bargain freely negotiated helped little. The Flavians were now confronted with the very real danger that, if they separated on their several errands, they might be hunted down individually and dealt with as traitors. The prefect was a moderate man, anxious at all costs to avoid bloodshed; but he was not lacking in courage. He decided to proceed to the Forum to explain the full facts of the situation to the crowds still gathered there in perplexity after Vitellius himself had retreated into the palace; and if necessary meet Vitellius once more. With him went a number of military and civilian dignitaries, though some of the less heroic Flavians quietly disappeared.
The party had reached the Basin of Fundanus, a well-known landmark on the slope leading down to the centre of the city, when it was confronted by a group of Vitellian activists, including some Praetorians, who were obviously bent on barring the way to the Forum and the palace. This encounter was unexpected. A scuffle developed, in which the Vitellians came off the better. In the circumstances Sabinus thought it wise not to attempt to push on towards the Forum, but to turn off to the right and occupy the strong point of the Capitoline Hill. So the motley force of soldiers and civilians, including some women (one is mentioned by name, the courageous Verulana Gratilla), turned off to the west and in due course reached and moved up the slope represented by the modern Cordinata, passed the walled-in site of the Grove of Refuge, where Romulus had accommodated the outlaws that flocked to early Rome, and entered by a postern the sanctuary of the Temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest on the southern summit of the two-peaked hill. The Vitellian troops threw a loose cordon round the foot of the eminence, but by about 10 p.m., when the pickets were growing careless, Sabinus was able to profit by the presence of an unwatched sector to get his grandchildren* and nephew Domitian to join him on the Capitol; he also managed to send news to the Flavian army, pointing out that the situation of the besieged, who had neither food nor proper arms, would soon become desperate unless help were forthcoming. It was later alleged, in defence of Antonius, that the night was so quiet that Sabinus himself could have got away without danger, for Vitellius’ men, though full of dash on the battlefield, were pretty slack when it came to humdrum fatigues and guard duties. In addition, the sudden onset of winter rain made seeing and hearing difficult.
Sabinus made no such attempt, and indeed any plan to escape from the Capitol to the advancing Flavian army would have been extremely hazardous. Even Sabinus’ messages sent before the siege informing Antonius of the abdication and related measures had had to pass a strict control, and for this reason had been got out of Rome in such ingenious containers as baskets of fruit, reeds used by fowlers to carry bird lime and coffins (with their corpses).
At or before first light on 19 December the city prefect sent a senior centurion, Cornelius Martialis, to the Palatine to protest to Vitellius about the breach in their agreement. Vitellius received the envoy and expressed his concern at the situation, apologizing for the exuberance of troops over whom, he said, he no longer exercised any real control. He was himself no less a prisoner than Sabinus. With this cold comfort, which had an appearance of plausibility, Martialis was dismissed; and Vitellius pointedly warned the officer to leave by a remote corner of the hill in order to avoid being murdered by the soldiers as the intermediary of an understanding that they abominated. He himself, he added, was in no position either to command or to prohibit; emperor no longer, he was merely the cause of fighting.
Still, there was no reason so far why some accommodation should not be worked out if Vitellius had had the capacity and time to reassert himself and assure the troops that Sabinus had acted in good faith in accordance with a prior arrangement. But at this point Fortune, who had so often favoured the Flavians, turned against them. After the surrender at Narni and before moving on to Otricoli, Antonius had ordered Petilius Cerialis to take 1,000 cavalrymen, including some of those who had changed sides at Terni, and move up by a different route towards Rome in order to reconnoitre what possibilities of entry there might be if, after all, Vitellius’ overtures came to nothing. This force had started off early on 16 December, and in the course of that day and the two following advanced via Rieti and the quiet Salarian Way as far as Fidenae, an old town much decayed, on the left bank of the Tiber five miles above Rome, represented now by the mound of Castel Giubileo. The ride of some seventy miles was performed without haste. It was the holiday season, and there seemed to be no urgency. But on the evening of 18 December, Cerialis at Fidenae must surely have got wind of the alarming developments in Rome. If so, he must have felt that he should do something to relieve the pressure upon the unfortunates gathered around Sabinus, whose character and ability to withstand prolonged strain he was too close a relative to misjudge. In any event, early on the following morning he ordered an attack on the north-eastern suburbs of the city, somewhat rashly expecting to encounter only a token resistance. He was much mistaken. This was precisely the neighbourhood in which lay the Praetorian barracks, and the Vitellian cohorts, even if easy-going in their watch upon the Capitol where there was no real danger, were sufficiently alive to the approach of Antonius to place pickets on the roads leading north. Cerialis ran into a mixed force of enemy infantry and cavalry amid the suburban villas, kitchen gardens and winding lanes of the Porta Salaria area, familiar enough to the garrison of Rome, but puzzling to cavalry from the Danube. Nor did the Flavian force work well together, for those elements who had, until four days before, considered themselves to be fighting for Vitellius now held back to see whether they should not revert to their previous allegiance. Julius Flavianus, the commander of one of the cavalry regiments, was captured, and the rest of the force was pushed ignominiously back, though the victors gave up the pursuit at Fidenae. Cerialis’ motives may have been laudable; but the action had been typically reckless and was to have grave consequences.*
The reaction of the Vitellians to this attack was understandably violent. It was obvious, they said to themselves, that the arrival of Cerialis had been a clumsy attempt to sneak into Rome while they themselves were preoccupied in containing Sabinus and Domitian. Indeed the whole comedy of the abortive abdication had been a deep-laid plot by the scheming old politician hoping to mislead Vitellius and stultify the loyalty of the Praetorians. So without waiting for heavy equipment and without their officers (who may have judged the situation more coolly and with longer views) most of the three Praetorian cohorts made off in a fury along the main road that led into the city. It must have been about midday when, descending by the Via di Marforio, they debouched on the northern corner of the Forum Romanum, rushed past between the Temples of Concord and Saturn, and charged straight along the Capitoline slope as far as the outer main gateway of the sacred enclosure. Their appearance could hardly have been expected by Sabinus, for its motive—revenge for the seemingly collusive synchronism of Cerialis’ approach—was unknown to him. But there were soldiers among the party who could think and act quickly. In A.D. 69 a long portico lined the right-hand side of the rise as you ascended. The Flavian soldiers, coming from higher ground, rapidly posted themselves on the roof of this colonnade and from it assailed the Vitellians with stones and tiles as they tried to pass beneath them. The attackers for their part were armed only with swords. Beaten back at the first attempt, they decided that they would not wait for artillery to be brought up from the barracks two miles away. They set light to the portico at its lowest point and as the flames spread uphill, driving back the Flavians, they followed them up, and would have battered down the charred gates, had not Sabinus uprooted a number of the statues which thickly adorned the area and with them formed an improvised barricade.
Foiled at the main entrance, the Vitellians soon found three other ways of access. Redescending the Clivus Capitolinus, they divided at its foot. Some made for the Via dell Arco di Settimio Severo, the Hundred Steps between the Register House and the prison, determined on an assault from the southern part of the Piazza del Campidoglio. Others rode round to the north face of the Capitol and mounted the ramp used by Sabinus and his followers on the previous day. Yet a third group entered the ground floors of the high tenements that hugged the Capitoline rock on the north and north-east sides, climbing up under cover from storey to storey and emerging at the tops of the buildings. In a time of peace which had encouraged a comparable situation at Verona and Cremona, these flatted houses had been allowed to mount level with the surface of the sacred area. This was much the most serious threat to the defenders. In an effort to snap off this attack, Quintius Atticus, it seems, employed the weapon already used by the enemy and ordered the houses to be set on fire. They blazed up with the notorious combustibility of the Roman flat complex, and from there the fire leapt to the portico that fringed the Capitoline area. In close proximity lay the rear of the great temple. Its old wooden rafters, despite the recent rain as dry as tinder under the well-tended tiles, caught fire, and fed a holocaust. As the whole building flared, forcing both attackers and defenders back, the triple Temple of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva was burnt to the ground undefended and un-attacked. Three thousand bronze tablets, containing the text of senatorial decrees and laws going back almost to the earliest days of Rome perished in the fire. It had been a wonderful archive, whose loss was not easily made good.
The great pillar of fire and smoke announced not the help but the anger of the gods, working through the folly of men. To the Roman and non-Roman world the destruction of the national shrine, before which, almost a year ago, Galba had prayed for the welfare of Rome and himself, seemed a portent of retribution. The Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus was coeval with the founding of the republic. It had been vowed by the good king Tarquin the Elder and dedicated by the heroic consul Horatius. Its first structure, whose foundations may still be seen beneath the Conservatori Museum, had lasted for 425 years, until on 6 July 83 B.C. a mysterious act of arson had destroyed it, in a disaster that heralded the tyranny of Sulla, the dictator whose example and succession had brought about the downfall of the republic. Now its replacement, dedicated in 69 B.C., had been destroyed 138 years later under the principate, in the madness of another civil war. Did the repeated doom foreshadow the accelerated approach of a final ruin?75But there was little time for melancholy philosophy on that afternoon of calamity. The fire seems to have consumed Sabinus’ will to resist and his ability to command. He gave conflicting orders, immediately supplanted by the instructions of others, none of them carried out. Soon the defenders threw down their arms and looked around for methods of escape or places of concealment: the cliffs or crypts or sacristies. As resistance died, the Vitellians forced their way in from the three sides. A few of the Flavian professional soldiers—tribunes or centurions like Cornelius Martialis, Aemilius Pacensis, Casperius Niger, Didius Scaeva—ventured to resist and were cut down. Sabinus was unarmed and made no attempt to run; together with Quintius Atticus he was surrounded and taken prisoner. Some of the defenders, disguising themselves as Vitellians and when challenged giving the Vitellian watchword which they had learned in the confusion, managed to get away through the smouldering tenements, and that these were fairly numerous is shown by the fact that many self-seeking characters who had had nothing to do with the fighting on the Capitol later claimed to have participated in it. As soon as the defences were breached, Domitian had disappeared.
Sabinus and Atticus, heavily manacled, were taken to the Palatine, where in the forecourt at the head of the staircase Vitellius received them with looks and words that showed little hostility. He was well aware of his own slender authority and of the innocence of the prefect and the consul, who had merely tried to carry out the agreement arrived at in the Temple of Apollo. But he was unable to save Sabinus. The prefect who had served his country so well was stabbed and hacked to death by the mob. His head was cut off and the decapitated body dragged to the point where the carcases of felons were exposed at the foot of the Gemonian Steps. Vitellius can hardly be blamed for a barbarity so obviously contrary to his own interest and so certain to be avenged; and he did succeed in saving the life of the consul. When asked about the origin of the fire, Atticus had admitted issuing the order to ignite the tenements, thus unintentionally causing the destruction of the temple. This admission, which relieved the Vitellians of the opprobrium of sacrilege, was no doubt honest, obscured though it later was by the efforts of the Flavian historians to shift the blame on to Vitellian shoulders. It was perhaps the consideration that such a valuable witness should be kept alive that enabled Vitellius to mollify the would-be executioners.
The death of Flavius Sabinus was a senseless act of lynch-law, a tragic end to a life of long service to the state. At the time of his death, Vespasian’s brother was in his sixties, and his public career extended over thirty-five years. In 43 he fought in Britain with his brother. He governed Moesia for seven years (49–56) and was city prefect in 56–60 and 62–68 under Nero, and once again in the present year from Otho’s accession onward. In 61 he seems to have held a special commission to conduct the census of the Gallic provinces, a particularly onerous post in a financially important part of the empire. Sabinus was a mild and honest man, lacking the ability to dominate events and yielding perhaps too readily to the pressures put upon him by circumstances and people. Thus in April, on hearing of Otho’s death, Dolabella had left his place of banishment at Aquino and made his way to Rome as a possible candidate for the principate and rival to Vitellius. The threats of Triaria had forced Sabinus to report this potentially dangerous development to Vitellius, who demanded the man’s death. It fell to Sabinus to arrange a discreet liquidation, accelerated by the impatience of the executioner, who murdered him at a wayside inn. It can neither be proved nor disproved that Sabinus (or his son: Tacitus is vague) urged Caecina to desert to the Flavian cause; but from August onwards the news of his brother’s salutation as emperor at Alexandria and in the East must have put him in an invidious position. It says something for his honesty—and for Vitellius’ own regard for him—that he was maintained in the key position of prefect of the city until the end, that he was acceptable as a mediator to Vitellius, and that the latter had no complaint to make against him even on the occupation of the Capitol. There were few more innocent victims of the year of civil strife than he. In January 70, when Rome had fallen, something was done to make amends for his death. At the proposal of Domitian, the Senate voted him a state funeral, a medallion portrait, probably to be placed in the Senate House, and a statue in one of the two semicircular porticoes of the Forum of Augustus. Here, honoured in effigy and epitaph, he joined the company of the triumphatores. 76
Meanwhile, forty miles to the north the army of Antonius Primus was celebrating the Saturnalia with a well-earned rest (the legions had scarcely paused at Carsulae) and the usual jollification.* When such numbers of men were gathered in a small town, it may not have been possible to provide the plums, dates, figs and apples that traditionally accompanied such an occasion, but there were certainly no duties to speak of. The officers messed with the men without distinction of rank, and for once all could dice for nuts or money without breaking regulations. The necessity of leaving a number of troops, own and enemy, on the plain of Terni had made it advisable to march on immediately after the Vitellian capitulation at Narni to tap a fresh source of supply. The prosperous little town of Otricoli, already in the home stretch of the Tiber valley, was only twelve miles away, and an obvious choice. On 16 December, therefore, the main body of the Flavians had moved on, and during the first two days of the Saturnalia, 17 and 18 December, they rested, totally unaware that the president of the immortals, whose colossal head may already have impressed the beholder at Otricoli, was about to lose his temple at Rome and Sabinus his life. All seemed over bar the ceremonial entry.
The unfortunate fact that the inactivity of Antonius synchronized with the siege of the Capitol became a matter of heated discussion later, when inquests on the events of December were held by gossips, pamphleteers and, in due course, historians. Wild allegations were made by those who sought to please Mucianus by vilifying his rival: the general had been bribed by Vitellius (correspondence was known to have been exchanged between them) with the promise of a consulship, marriage with his daughter and a rich dowry to go with her. In fact, there were three perfectly credible and creditable reasons for the pause at Otricoli. Military accounts of Domitianic date, preserved in a papyrus at Geneva, mention among a number of stoppages deducted from pay a saturnalicium k(astrense), or contribution to the cost of a camp Christmas dinner (on the verso, incidentally, appears the name, in the rank of camp commandant, of the forceful T. Suedius Clemens, who had been the most effective among the leaders of Otho’s naval expedition in spring of the present year); so that even if Macrobius did not fill the strange silence of Tacitus, we should still suspect that the Saturnalia was a military as well as a civil holiday. Secondly, given time, there were good prospects that Vitellius would abdicate, or that a compromise avoiding an attack on Rome would be achieved. Thirdly, it was Antonius’ duty, if not his pleasure, to await the arrival of Mucianus, who by this time was traversing the Furlo only 160 miles, or eight rapid marching days, behind. Vespasian’s lieutenant had, if only in veiled hints, made it abundantly clear to Antonius that he expected to be present at the formal entry into liberated Rome. All these considerations—including that of exact chronology—were muddled in the controversy, and only some appear in an ill-digested form in Tacitus.77
The holiday atmosphere was rudely interrupted in the small hours of 19 December when Sabinus’ messenger announced the investment of the Capitol and the precarious position of Sabinus himself, Domitian and their company, who even if their lives were spared were likely to make useful hostages. Antonius immediately struck camp and marched hard southwards, covering in some twelve hours the thirty-five miles or so to Grotta Rossa. When the weary troops reached the village well after the winter nightfall, it was to find that their forced march had gone for nothing. They were too late. The Capitol had been stormed several hours before, Sabinus was dead and Domitian missing. Nor was this the sum total of disaster. We must suppose, from the proximity of Castel Giubileo to the Flaminian Way on the other bank of the river, that Cerialis’ ill-success of that morning was then reported to Antonius; and finally the apparent enthusiasm of the people of Rome for Vitellius, demonstrated by the rejection of the abdication and the demand for arms (answered by their distribution to slave and free), proved that the war was by no means over. Whether the intelligence also included, as it may well have done, the story of Terracina’s capture by Lucius, is uncertain. But in any case it was one of unrelieved catastrophe, and Antonius can have enjoyed little sleep that night. Much later, when the Flavian general had lived for many years in retirement at Toulouse, Martial too glibly imagines his thoughts on reviewing his past life:
No day recalled brings heaviness or pain,
No day that’s done makes memory aghast:
A good man’s span is long; for him the past
Brings pleasure pure, and so he lives again.
To relive, and repeatedly, the events of 19 December in memory was no addition to life.78
In the morning morale had recovered somewhat. There was no note of uncertainty in the rejection of the enemy’s request for a few days’ armistice. At the meeting of the Senate on the afternoon of 19 December, Vitellius had recommended the sending of envoys both to Cerialis and to Antonius, to ask for peace or at least for a respite. The envoys received short shrift, and went in peril of their lives. At Castel Giubileo, the leader of the deputation, Arulenus Rusticus, was wounded in a scuffle, an incident thoroughly understandable in the circumstances, but stigmatized by Tacitus as particularly scandalous in view of Rusticus’ high standing as a Stoic philosopher and political theorist, quite apart from the violation of the status of ambassador and praetor. Such nice considerations cannot have weighed with men smarting under defeat and incensed by the humbug of those who had hunted down the helpless Sabinus and then asked for concessions for themselves. Rusticus’ fellow-negotiators, too, were roughly handled, and when his senior lictor tried to clear a way for the magistrate, he was killed. Eventually order was restored, and Petilius sent the mission back empty-handed under the protection of an escort. A calmer attitude marked the reception of the envoys sent to Antonius, though here, too, the Vitellians adopted a high-and-mighty tone ill-suited to their predicament. One of the party, a leading equestrian and Stoic, Musonius Rufus, evoked considerable ridicule by lecturing armed men on the blessings of peace. Many laughed in his face, more found him merely tedious, and a few of the rougher sort wanted to knock him down. Luckily Musonius held his tongue in time. The Flavians also received a deputation of Vestal Virgins carrying a personal appeal from Vitellius to Antonius, in which he asked for one day’s grace to facilitate a general agreement. But of course it was useless. The Vestals were sent away with the courtesy due to their sex and order, and Rome was brusquely informed that the murder of Sabinus and the firing of the Capitol meant that there could be no question of further negotiation.
However, Antonius was a reasonable man. He paraded the legions and tried to cool tempers, urging an encampment for the night three miles further on at the north end of the Milvian Bridge, before entering Rome on 21 December. This would have conceded the delay Vitellius had asked for, but Antonius’ hearers were suspicious of any postponement; moreover the civilians whom Vitellius had armed had been told to station themselves on the Monti Parioli, immediately to the southeast of the bridge, and the glint of their banners in the morning sun gave the impression, false though it proved to be, that this was a part of a sizeable force bent on defending every inch of Rome. Antonius’ army was set in motion, and Cerialis was informed.
The narrow Milvian Bridge was held by the Vitellians; but the position was soon turned by cavalry who forded the Tiber, its usual shallow self despite the very recent rain, and took the defenders in the rear. The armed militia on the Parioli Hills was soon swept away. By late morning the Flavian army was moving southward from the bridge on the last two miles of its journey from the Danube. At a point approximating to the Piazza del Popolo, the army divided into three. One column continued to follow the Via Flaminia, which beyond Agrippa’s Portico became Broad Street. A second advanced along the Tiber bank, passing west of the Mausoleum of the Julio-Claudian emperors. A third turned to the left to move through the depression between the Pincian and the Quirinal in a south-easterly direction towards the Park of Sallust and the Praetorian barracks. There was a good deal of fighting outside the city boundaries: it mostly went in favour of the Flavians, helped as they were by better leadership and morale and a decided superiority in numbers. But the Vitellians fought back sturdily. When the streets closed in, the attackers were pelted with tiles from the rooftops, and severe losses were inflicted by small parties of determined men operating in confined passages, such as were typical of the less modern parts of Rome not swept away by the fire or Nero’s town-planning. Despair sometimes drove the Vitellians forward wildly, and though routed, they re-formed repeatedly in the southern half of the Campus Martius within the city. However, the stiffest resistance was offered to the Flavians who had turned south-eastwards towards the Sallustian Park, where narrow and slippery tracks seamed an area not yet fully developed. The Vitellians standing on the park walls, which followed the escarpment of the Quirinal and formed in themselves a considerable obstacle, hurled back the attackers below them with stones and javelins until dusk. Finally Petilius’ cavalry, set in motion a little later than desirable, forced the Colline Gate and enveloped the enemy position, avenging the disgrace incurred in the same area on the previous day.
By this time the position of the Vitellians in the centre had already become hopeless and organized resistance had ceased. It was now a matter of mopping up odd groups or individuals who had taken refuge in shops and palazzi. A macabre aspect of the fighting was that it was treated as a Christmas spectacle by civilians perched at the windows of tenement buildings: cheering and clapping, they would point out where enemy soldiers were lurking. The latter were then dragged out and killed at the instance of the mob, like gladiators judged unworthy to live in the amphitheatre. While the pursuit continued, the mob looted.
The heaviest encounters naturally occurred around the Praetorian barracks, which the most devoted Vitellians defended to the bitter end. Here it was a struggle between the ex-Praetorians of Galba and Otho, and those who had supplanted them under Vitellius. Every ounce of cunning, every form of tactical ingenuity was exerted by two sides between whose quality as fighting men there was little to choose. But the Vitellians had no battle cry of vengeance or hope to inspire them. Outnumbered and doomed, they fought on in professional pride, their only solace the assurance of being found worthy soldiers at the last. Men died hanging doubled-up from the crenellations and towers, and when the gates were torn from their sockets by the Flavians, the surviving Vitellian Praetorians formed themselves into a compact body and charged. They all fell with their wounds in front, facing the enemy, with honour.
Such consolation was not to be granted to the man for whom they fought. At about 2 p.m., when it was clear that the Flavian penetration was reaching the Campus Martius, Vitellius was taken in a chair through the back of the palace to his house on the Aventine, to which his wife and children had preceded him. His purpose at this time, provided he could lie low during the remaining hours of daylight, was to get away to the cohorts now presumed to be returning from Terra-cina with Lucius. Tacitus assumes that it was fickleness and panic that caused Vitellius to change his mind. A more probable motive may be discovered in his realization that the attack was developing more rapidly than he had expected and that the Flavian force advancing along the Tiber might well by-pass the centre and encircle it from the south before night fell, and long before Lucius could arrive. In that event the Aventine would soon be theirs, and it was easy to guess that the Flavian command would make a point of surrounding the Vitellian residence. His wife and family must be spared if possible. His own presence had become a menace to them. He told them to leave—time was short and the last hard parting must have been brief—and himself returned to the palace, either in the vague hope that resistance there could be prolonged until Lucius came to the rescue or more probably in the conviction—credible even in a character unfitted for heroics—that if the end must come, it should come while he was defending his palace with his personal servants. Whatever the motives of Vitellius, they played him false. Seeing their master depart, nearly all the palace staff had vanished. Vitellius wandered through the immense complex of buildings and found it forlorn and deserted. Many of the rooms had been locked by conscientious officials as they departed, and when a door did open, he shuddered to find emptiness. In a sudden panic, realizing that he was abandoned by everyone, he threw himself into the porter’s lodge, disguised himself as a slave, took the watchdog from its kennel and tied it outside the door of the apartment, which he jammed from inside with a bedstead and palliasse.
By this time advanced elements of the Flavian central column had entered the palace and were ransacking it. Vitellius was soon discovered and dragged out, unrecognized by Danubian troops who had never seen the emperor except in unfaithful effigy. When they asked him who he was and where he supposed Vitellius to be, he lied to them. The subterfuge was futile and degrading. A cohort tribune, Julius Placidus, soon appeared and recognized the tall, ungainly, dishevelled figure. Vitellius then resorted to another fruitless stratagem: would they keep him in custody, even in prison, for the time being? He had information touching the life of Vespasian. This was obviously a hint that he and he alone knew the identity of assassins sent to murder his successor. The device was not unknown: it had already been attempted without success by himself and Otho, Vespasian was said to have feared it, and Mucianus was to employ it against Piso in Africa in the New Year. True or false, the statement was disregarded. Vitellius’ hands were tied behind his back, a cord was placed round his neck and he was driven or hauled, like a reluctant ox dragged to the altar, through the jeering crowds filling the Forum. On the way a stray soldier from the German armies met the party. In the confusion the man had retained a sword. Either attempting rescue or trying to put Vitellius out of his misery, he aimed a blow which, partly parried, cut off the tribune’s ear, and he was immediately run through. Amid a hail of missiles Vitellius was driven forward, his captors holding a sword under his chin and pulling his hair back to force him to look up and face the tormentors. He saw his statues as they fell, the spot where Galba, against whom he had rebelled, met his end, and then the rostra where stood—worst sight of all—the statue of his father with the proud inscription ‘Unshakeably loyal to his emperor’. Finally they drove him to the Gemonian Steps where the body of Flavius Sabinus had lain two days before. His last words showed a not wholly degenerate spirit. When a tribune mocked him, he retorted: ego tamen imperator tuus fui—’Despite everything, I was your emperor.’ Thereupon he fell lifeless beneath a rain of blows, and in his death the mob reviled him as viciously as it had flattered him while he lived. The body was later dragged by the hook to the Tiber, to be carried down, like a parricide’s, to the sea that washes all things clean.
The historical tradition represents Aulus Vitellius as a gluttonous and drunken bon viveur, a frequenter of theatres and racecourses, and, typically and most frequently, the host or guest at a succession of Trimalchian banquets. It was inevitable that for the next fifteen years, the Flavian historians should deride the emperor against whom Vespasian had rebelled, while at the same time denouncing the revolt of Vitellius against Galba. The two rebellions were embarrassingly similar. It was not immediately obvious that Fabius Valens and Caecina Alienus were worse than Cornelius Laco and Titus Vinius, particularly as Caecina continued to enjoy Vespasian’s favour, in common with a number of nobles who switched allegiance at the right time. The armies of the East and of the Danube were not palpably more altruistic than the garrison of the Rhine. The government of Vitellius had certainly not been revealed as insufferably bad by June, the month in which, at latest, Vespasian decided to rise against him. It was therefore necessary for these writers to stress the psychological unfitness of Vitellius to rule, even more than Vespasian’s reluctance to move against him. The bias is transparent in Flavius Josephus, Suetonius and in Pliny the Elder (so far as his attitude can be reconstructed). Tacitus himself is too much of a sceptic and too great a devotee of antithesis and paradox to accept all that the Flavian doctrine taught, but even with him some of the mud sticks, and he not infrequently hedges and takes refuge in apophthegms and ambiguities painful to contemplate, however dazzling at first glance. A dispassionate study of Vitellius hardly confirms the usual caricature. Among those acts of state which (fairly numerous in a short reign) are attributable to decisions of the emperor himself, it is hard to find much amiss, apart from the first—the original decision to invite, and then to accept, nomination to the principate. For this post Vitellius was equipped neither by temperament nor by training. He was a comfortable, easy family man, ready enough to entertain his friends lavishly, taking a lively interest in the turf and the stage, a spendthrift pursued by creditors, perhaps just capable of running the great family estate at Ariccia; unluckily, he was also saddled with the damnable inheritance of a great name. It was a calamity for him that his father had been three times consul, the friend and colleague of Claudius. Galba should no more have chosen Vitellius to command in Lower Germany than Hordeonius Flaccus in Upper. Once he had become emperor, it was inevitable that some spoils should be handed out and some scores settled. The most expensive of them was the drafting of 20,000 legionaries into the Urban and Praetorian Cohorts and the consequent rise in their rates of pay, respectively 375 and 750 denarii annually in place of 225 denarii, plus bonuses in proportion. To make room for the new Praetorians, those of Otho were discharged, though honourably, so that they retained their lump sum or land in lieu as pension. The main political victims were Pompeius Propinquus, too loyal to Galba, and some centurions, too loyal to Otho. But Julius Burdo, Julius Civilis, Licinius Proculus, Marius Celsus, Galerius Tra-chalus and Quintius Atticus were spared, often despite the malevolence of the Vitellians; and if it cost Sabinus dear to be the brother of an emperor designate, his death was contrary to the wish of Vitellius, who had unhesitatingly retained him as prefect of the city even after the proclamation of 1 July was known. There were no reprisals against the Helvetii, or against the Othonian generals. It is true that Cornelius Dolabella was thought too dangerous to live, but he had invited his fate. Under Vitellius, his reign largely occupied by the actuality or threat of hostilities, the financial crisis naturally deepened, and his measures here—a wealth tax upon freedmen, and the rather dangerous expedient of reducing legionary strengths by ceasing to recruit—could hardly be expected to show any immediate result. It is to Vitellius’ credit that he regularly attended the Senate, even when minor business was on the agenda, and his rearrangement of the consular list was tactfully managed. As between Caecina and Valens, he tried to hold the scales of favour level, and his frequent public appearances not only in the Senate, but also in the theatre and amphitheatre made him surprisingly, if superficially, popular in the city. In the purely military sphere he comes under heavy criticism from Tacitus, who never forgives failure. But here, too, he often made sensible decisions or accepted sensible advice. The invasion of Italy by three separate forces was well planned in Cologne, and in withdrawing troops from the Rhine frontier Vitellius showed more restraint and sense of responsibility than did Antonius Primus and Aponius Saturninus in respect of the Danube. For the defeat of his army at Cremona he cannot be blamed, except in so far as his absence facilitated the treachery of Bassus and Caecina. The decisions not to defend the Apennine crossings and to crush the mutineers at Terracina are not obviously wrong. Finally, at the family level he showed affection and even self-sacrifice. As a man, despite the odd impression created by above-average height combined with a flabby physique, he was amiable. The conversations which led to his decision to abdicate were initiated by Vitellius himself, and it was not his fault if the move failed. Only the failure of nerve in his last hours shows a character unable to take severe strain: here, his critic Tacitus is as merciless to Vitellius as he had been generous to Otho, spokesman of a society which demanded that, whenever and however the end came, it must be faced unflinchingly and with decorum. At the time of his death Vitellius was fifty-seven years old, and his reign lasted eight months.
On the day after the capture of Rome, Domitian appeared to claim the position of son and deputy of Vespasian Augustus. It was later alleged by flatterers that his role in the last days of Vitellius’ reign had been heroic. The actual facts are less heady. As soon as the defences of the Capitol were breached on the afternoon of 19 December, Domitian, with, perhaps, one young Sabinus, had hidden in the house of the sacristan of the great temple, and perhaps later in the cellars of the burnt-out building. He spent the whole of the night in concealment. At or before dawn, he was smuggled down the slopes or descended through the tenement houses, and so reached the Velabrum and the house of Cornelius Primus, a dependant of his father. On the suggestion of this Cornelius, who had perhaps read of an incident in the proscriptions of 43 B.C.,* Domitian Was Dressed In The Linen Garment, Ankle-Long, of a priest of Isis. Even better, if available, would have been a papier-mache dog’s-head mask.* In this disguise he was thrust in among a band of real priests of Isis who, in view of the approach of the fighting, were hurriedly moving through the Velabrum, conveying some of the more precious objects of the great Temple of Isis near the Baths of Agrippa to a point beyond the Tiber. In the confusion the masquerade was not detected either by the priests or by Vitellian sympathizers, who at this eleventh hour had been told to secure Domitian as a hostage. Beyond the Tiber bridges, which might be expected to be heavily controlled, the young man managed to leave the procession, and once more baffled detection overnight, this time by hiding—again with one companion, presumably the same—in the house of the mother of a fellow-student in the Trastevere.* By late evening of 20 December, Rome was completely in Flavian hands, but no prominent person in his senses would have dared to venture out. When daylight came on 21 December all seemed quiet. Domitian recrossed the Tiber and revealed himself to the Flavian leaders and troops camped in and around the palace. The men crowded round, hailed him as ‘Caesar’, and just as they were, without ceremony or smartness, still armed and stained with battle, escorted him to his father’s house on the Quirinal.79