XII
NERO’S FATE CHANGES EVERYTHING
In Greece that September, the emperor Nero had received the news of Vespasian’s summer successes in Galilee with impatience. Earlier in AD 67 he had competed at the Olympic Games at Olympia, where he had won all the musical events and been awarded victory in the ten-horse chariot event—even though he had fallen out of his chariot and failed to finish. He had subsequently victoriously competed at the Isthmian Games at Corinth in April–May, then the Pythian Games at Delphi in August, where he had also visited the Oracle of Delphi, going to the head of the line of supplicants for a prediction, the nature of which was never revealed. Then it was back to Corinth to turn the first sods of his planned Isthmian Canal project, for which Vespasian sent him the six thousand Jewish slave laborers from Taricheae.
With the Roman conquest of Jerusalem clearly still a long way off, Nero had unhappily canceled his planned Ethiopian operation to the south and looked east. Deciding that he would instead focus on the Caspian Gates offensive once Vespasian wrapped up the annoying Jewish problem, he expected Vespasian to have the Judean counteroffensive completed as soon as possible so that all resources could be focused on the Caspian Gates in the new year.
In December, Nero’s freedman Helius arrived in Greece from Rome to personally beg the emperor to return to the capital so he could be seen to deal with the problems simmering in the empire’s western provinces. With the offensive against the Jewish rebels on hold for the winter, Nero unhappily acceded to Helius’s requests and announced that he was going home. Sailing back to the west coast of Italy from Greece, by early January he had entered Neapolis (Naples), then Antium (Anzio), then Alba Longa in the Alban Hills outside Rome, finally entering Rome itself, always in triumphal processions as he returned home as victor at the Greek games. He had originally intended that these celebrations would combine his military, athletic, and artistic achievements, but as the ongoing Jewish War had robbed him of his planned Ethiopian and Caspian Gates military victories, the Triumphs were for his achievements in Greece alone.
For the Rome procession of his Triumph, part of the city wall was torn down to allow him a broader entry—the usual gate used by triumphants, the Porta Triumphalis, which was kept locked except when used for Triumphs, was quite narrow. For his Triumph, Nero rode through the streets of Rome in the golden chariot that Augustus had first used for his triumphal processions and had last been used by Germanicus and his brother Claudius in their Triumphs, in celebration of military victories. The rest of the time the chariot was reverently kept in the Temple of Capitoline Jupiter.
As he drove through the city, along streets lined with the cheering population, the beaming Nero wore a purple robe covered with gold spangles, and a crown of wild olive, the symbol of peace. In one hand he held up his laurel crown from the Pythian Games. Signboards held aloft by marchers in the procession proclaimed the names of each of the games won by Nero and the declaration: “Nero Caesar, first of all Romans since the beginning of the world, he won this.”63 The lyre player Diodorus rode in the chariot with him as the procession wound through the city, past adoring crowds in the Circus Maximus and the Forum, to the Palatine. The chariot was preceded by the senators of Rome and followed by troops of the Praetorian and German Guards, all chanting:
“Hail Olympian Victor! Hail Pythian Victor! Augustus! Augustus! Hail to Nero, our Hercules! Hail to Nero, our Apollo! The only Victor of the Grand Tour, the only one from the beginning of time! Augustus! Augustus! Oh, Divine Voice! Blessed are they that hear you.”64
Even though Nero was back in Rome after an absence of over a year, he was still little interested in the affairs of state. When, at the beginning of April, news was brought to him of Julius Vindex’s declaration of revolt in Gaul in late March—by some accounts on March 28, the anniversary of the murder of Nero’s mother, Agrippina the Younger—Nero was more interested in discussing the workings of a new musical instrument, a water organ for the theater. Vindex, himself a native of Aquitania in Gaul, had attracted vast crowds of Gauls in Lugdunum (Lyon) with speeches about the rights of Gauls, and had now thrown off Neronian rule. Supported by leading men of Gaul, Vindex had enlisted thousands of willing young men into a Gallic army that he would march on Italy to dethrone Nero by force.
It was Praetorian Prefect Tigellinus who dispatched orders for a military response to Vindex and his Gallic army. From northern Italy, the recently formed unit originally named the Phalanx of Alexander the Great marched under the new name of the 1st Italica Legion to intercept the Gauls before they crossed the Alps. They were accompanied by the Taurine Horse, a cavalry wing from today’s Turin in northern Italy, with the overall force commanded by the senator Junius Blaesus. Orders were also sent to Lucius Verginius Rufus, Roman proconsul of Upper Germany. Rufus, who commanded an army of four crack legions, was to march south into Gaul from his headquarters at Mogantiacum, today’s Mainz, on the Rhine, with elements from all four legions, to likewise intercept Vindex on the march.
Taking thousands of legionaries and numerous auxiliaries with him, Rufus moved quickly. Heading south, he cut off Vindex’s force of mostly raw recruits outside Vesontio, today’s Besançon, at the foot of the Alps. Here in 58 BC, Julius Caesar had won one of the greatest victories of his Gallic War, and here, 110 years later, another Gallic army was to be routed. It is unclear precisely when the battle between the forces of Vindex and Rufus took place—it was apparently sometime in late May.
Vindex, in his forties, was well built and possessed a reputation as a fine soldier—a senator of Rome, he would have likely served as a legion commander while in his thirties, a posting that usually only lasted two to three years. His opponent, Verginius Rufus, on the other hand, was not a warlike man. He was a literary man, a noted author who was guardian to the writer Pliny the Younger. Rufus’s funeral oration would in years to come be written and delivered by noted historian Tacitus.
In hopes of talking the Gauls into turning around and going home, Rufus coaxed Vindex to a parley, but, apparently, as the two leaders were talking peace, Rufus’s experienced troops, who were chafing at the bit to teach the Gauls a lesson, launched an attack on Vindex’s army of their own accord. The Gauls were slaughtered, and Vindex took his own life just two months after launching his revolt.
As Rufus’s troops reasserted Roman control in Gaul, they offered to make Rufus their emperor, an offer Rufus would refuse, both then and when it was again made the following year. He and his legions returned to the Rhine, and when the 1st Italica Legion and Taurine Horse reached Gaul, they marched on up to the city that had briefly been the center of Vindex’s revolt, Lyon, where they reestablished control of Gaul for Nero Caesar and the Senate of Rome, and Junius Blaesus took charge as the new governor.
Despite the destruction of Vindex and the threat he posed, the seeds of revolt had been sown, and at Rome, Nero was panicking. Five thousand freedmen sailors of the Roman war fleet at Misenum had been rapidly formed into a legion, promised Roman citizenship, and marched to Rome to protect their emperor. To further increase Nero’s protection, orders were sent to Dalmatia for several cohorts of the 11th Claudia Legion and 15th Primigenia Legion to march at once for Rome. When they reached the capital by June, they were quartered in public buildings along with the seamen now serving as legionaries of the 1st Legion of the Fleet. These troops were joined by a number of retired legion veterans who were living in Italy and were recalled to their standards as part of their Evocati militia service.
By the first week of June, one of Nero’s two Praetorian prefects, Nymphidius Sabinus, had forced the other prefect, Tigellinus, to resign, and convinced the Praetorian Guard to withdraw its support for the emperor. On June 8, it was announced in the Senate that Nero had fled to Egypt, and Servius Galba, seventy-year-old governor of Nearer Spain, was declared the new emperor. But Nero was still in Rome.
The following morning, Nero awoke in his fabulous new palace, the Golden House, built in the wake of the AD 64 Great Fire of Rome, to find that his German Guard bodyguards had disappeared. In a city swimming with troops—who had all been confined to barracks on the orders of the Senate—Nero was now the loneliest man in the world and the most unsafe of rulers. With four freedmen servants, he fled to the suburban home of one of those freedmen. There, about the middle of the day, as Praetorian cavalry were heard approaching and a terrified Nero feared being tortured and executed, he slit his own throat with the help of his freedmen.
So it was that on June 9, AD 68, after a reign of thirteen years, Nero Caesar, thirty-year-old fifth emperor of Rome and last member of the Caesar family, died by his own hand. A most unfit young man to rule an empire, Nero had always seen himself as a performer of enormous talent. His last words were said to be, “Oh, what an artist dies in me.”65
Back in March, just as Vindex’s revolt was gathering steam in Gaul, Vespasian had launched the campaigning season in Judea by leading two rested legions and supporting troops out of Caesarea and down the coastal plain. Climbing into the hills, he secured Antipatris, Lydda (Lod), and Jamnia, Gentile-controlled cities which gladly opened their gates to him.
Civilians loyal to Rome who had followed the general south were settled in these cities, with garrisons left in all three and also in the village of Adida—thought to be modern Al-Haditha, three miles east of Lod. Retaining his legionaries for offensive operations, Vespasian assigned auxiliaries and allied troops to these garrisons. In the larger towns the garrisons were commanded by centurions, while decurions were put in charge in the smaller centers.
Vespasian then established a new walled marching camp at the town of Emmaus, just nine miles from Jerusalem, as his forward base. There, he installed General Cerialis with the 5th Macedonica Legion and supporting auxiliaries, straddling the highway from the coast that the ill-fated Governor Gallus had used, and cutting off Jerusalem from the northwest. A tombstone discovered near Emmaus in modern times, of a thirty-year-old optio of the 5th Macedonica who had served nine years with the Roman army, probably stems from this period.
Vespasian then returned to Caesarea, where he received the news of Vindex’s uprising in Gaul. Josephus was to claim that Vespasian now vowed to end the war in Judea as quickly as possible so that the emperor Nero had one less thing to worry about. To permit this, Vespasian sent orders to Trajan at Scythopolis to bring the 10th Fretensis Legion and meet him in June outside rebel-held Jericho, to the north of the Dead Sea, in the meantime tasking subordinates with wrapping up Jewish resistance east of the Jordan River and in Samaria.
The ever-reliable Tribune Placidus was given three thousand infantry and five hundred cavalry to pursue those partisans who had fled Gadara the previous year and were still known to be hiding out east of the Jordan River in the Perea district. Vespasian gave another large detachment of infantry and cavalry to an officer named Lucius Annius, with orders to neutralize Gerasa north of Jerusalem, the only city in Samaria still held by rebels. Annius, probably of tribune rank and likely a client of Vespasian, had lately joined Vespasian’s staff.66
Annius’s troops stormed over the walls of Gerasa at their first rush and overwhelmed the thousand young Jewish men defending the city, who were all put to death. Annius made captives and future slaves of all the family members of these slain rebels, then let his troops loot the town. Gerasa was burned to the ground, as were all the surrounding villages, before Annius rejoined Vespasian in Caesarea with his troops and captives.
Meanwhile, east of the Jordan River, Tribune Placidus’s men would take longer to achieve their goal. Cornering large numbers of armed rebels, they drove them to the Jordan. Those who were not slaughtered on the riverside drowned while trying to swim to safety. So many bodies filled the river that it was impassable for a time, and countless bloated corpses subsequently floated down into the Sea of Galilee. According to Josephus, 15,000 Jews were killed here by Placidus and his troops, with another 2,200 taken prisoner, and large quantities of oxen, sheep, asses, and camels were captured for use by Roman army quartermasters.
Placidus and his troops then ranged through all the Perea district, securing cities and towns including Abila, Bezemoth, and Julias—the latter being a Romanized fishing village on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee named for the emperor Augustus’s daughter Julia. Also known by the Jewish name of Bethsaida, Julias had been the birthplace of the fishermen brothers Shimon, Andreas, and Philippos, who became known as the Christian Apostles Simon-Peter, Andrew, and Philip.
All of Perea from the Sea of Galilee to the desert fortress of Machaerus was progressively cleared of rebels by Placidus and his troops. Machaerus itself remained in partisan hands for now. It would take a major siege to dislodge its rebel defenders. A number of partisan deserters came over to Placidus during this Perean operation, and he trusted them with guarding the principal towns of Perea for Rome when he and his troops withdrew to link up with General Trajan’s approaching column. These turncoats remained loyal to Rome for the remainder of the war.
Vespasian, meanwhile, camped at Corea near Jericho with the remaining cohorts of the 15th Apollinaris Legion and waited for Trajan to join him. When Trajan’s column approached with the 10th Fretensis and Placidus’s recently returned troops, Vespasian established a large camp just outside Jericho, where Trajan’s and Placidus’s forces combined with his. On June 21, with his now enlarged army, Vespasian marched on Jericho.
As the Roman force approached, partisans poured out of the city. Some stood to fight in the open, others fled to the mountains. Those who fought were overwhelmed and massacred. When Vespasian marched into Jericho, he found it deserted and desolate. Placing a garrison of auxiliary and allied troops there, he sent legionaries against the nearby hilltop fortress at Cypros, site of the earlier massacre of a 3rd Gallica Legion cohort. Cypros was easily overrun and subsequently demolished. As a result, Vespasian’s troops now blocked the route to Jerusalem from east of the Jordan, preventing fresh Jewish recruits from as far away as Parthia reaching the rebel capital.
Before Vespasian returned to Caesarea, he ventured south from Jericho to the Dead Sea, or Lake Asphaltitus as the Jews called it, to play tourist. Told that it was possible to float unaided in this lake, Vespasian had several bound Jewish prisoners thrown into the water to test the claim. He was highly amused when the Jews indeed floated. The Jews concerned were no doubt highly relieved. It is likely these prisoners came from the community of the Essene Jewish sect that had a monastery at Qumran, nine miles from Jericho and on the northwest fringe of the Dead Sea. The famous Dead Sea Scrolls would be found in caves nearby in 1946–47 and 1956. The Qumran monastery had been captured by Vespasian’s cavalry, which established an outpost there.
On Vespasian’s return to Caesarea, he gave orders for all field units to prepare to march on Jerusalem. Shortly after his return, however, official word arrived by sea from Rome that Nero was dead and Servius Galba had been hailed emperor by the Senate, even though Galba was in Spain. Vespasian immediately put all offensive operations on hold until the situation at Rome was clarified. For one thing, it was uncertain what position the troops at Rome would take in relation to Galba, especially the Praetorian Guard.
Galba was preparing to march overland from Spain with an army to take the throne, by force if necessary. His deputy was Marcus Otho, governor of Rome’s third Spanish province, Lusitania, which covered much of today’s Portugal. Galba’s preparations included the raising of a new legion in his province of Nearer Spain—he would leave the province’s resident legion, the 6th Victrix, in place to maintain order after he departed. Because the new Spanish legion was raised from Roman citizens resident in the traditional Spanish recruiting grounds of the 7th Claudia Legion, the unit was initially known as the 7th Galbiana, literally Galba’s 7th Legion, later becoming the 7th Gemina after combination with another legion.
Auxiliary cavalry and auxiliary light infantry based in Spain would join Galba’s march on Rome. One auxiliary infantry unit we can state with some confidence to have been in Galba’s force was a cohort of British auxiliaries whose officers would include a handsome Briton named Florus—his Latin name means “beautiful.” He was a favorite of Galba’s, who would grant him Roman citizenship, after which he took the name Sulpicius Florus. He would shortly be listed among officers in Rome with Galba and Otho.67
As Galba and his troops entered Italy, Praetorian Prefect Nymphidius, son of a freedwoman, claimed that he was the illegitimate son of the late emperor Caligula and a legitimate claimant of the throne. His withdrawal of protection for Nero, which had led directly to Nero’s demise, had clearly been intended by Nymphidius as a prelude to installing himself on the throne. But his Praetorian Guard didn’t agree; it put an end to his lofty ambitions—with the sword.
When Galba reached Rome in October, he was met on the outskirts of the capital by the unarmed seamen who had earlier been formed into the 1st Legion of the Fleet by Nero. Blocking Galba’s path, they vowed to serve him but clamored for the Roman citizenship promised by Nero. In response, the notoriously taciturn Galba, a very experienced, no nonsense general who no doubt scoffed at the idea of a legion made up of lowly freedmen, sent his cavalry against them; thousands of these men who wished to serve him were mown down and killed.
With this innocent blood on his hands and his reputation soiled, Galba entered Rome. His brief rule was to be characterized by arrogance, brutality, and chaos. Troops summoned to the city by Nero still remained there. Galba didn’t send them back to their original commands, so they simply milled discontentedly around the city. Neither did Galba send orders to Vespasian for the continuance or cessation of the Judean War. This left Vespasian sitting idle and frustrated in Caesarea while Jewish rebels continued to hold Jerusalem.
By December, even though the sailing season was over and winter storms could be expected on the Mediterranean, Vespasian tired of waiting for guidance from Rome and decided to send his son Titus to the new emperor to pay Vespasian’s respects to Galba and to seek orders. King Herod Agrippa II chose to accompany Titus to Rome, also to pay his respects but mainly in hopes of having his territories and powers in the Middle East confirmed by the new emperor.
Vespasian had known Galba for many years, but no one ever described them as close, and they never had a client/patron relationship. New emperors invariably put their favorites—relatives and clients—into positions of power, and Vespasian occupied the most powerful position in the Roman East, with nine legions at his command. Did Galba wish him to remain in that post and press on with the conquest of Jerusalem? Or would the new emperor send out a replacement for Vespasian, complete with new lackeys and new orders?
A squadron of fast Liburnian warships was prepared at Caesarea, and in January of AD 69, in a lull in the weather, Titus and Agrippa parted from Vespasian and set sail, planning to coast all the way rather than head directly across the Mediterranean to Italy as warships frequently did. This meant their journey would take longer than if they took the direct route, but it would be safer, allowing them to duck into port should storms brew. Their little flotilla was sailing via ports in Achaea, en route to Italy, when news was received on board that Galba had been assassinated at Rome on January 15, after a reign of just seven months.
Galba’s unpopularity had spiraled after he parsimoniously refused to give his troops a “donative,” or bonus, which had become the norm when new emperors ascended the throne. In the end, even his friends Marcus Otho and Florus the Briton turned their backs on him. Galba’s own bodyguards deserted him as he was being carried in a litter through the Forum. A number of idle soldiers from the provinces and Evocati veterans had milled around Galba after he was dumped from the litter, calling for his blood. It was a legionary named Camurius, one of the men of the 15th Primigenia Legion sent to Rome from Dalmatia on Nero’s orders, who killed Galba. As the aged emperor lay winded on the flagstones, Camurius had put his sword to Galba’s throat and with his foot on the blade pressed down hard, decapitating him. Galba’s head was soon being paraded around Rome on a pike.
In Galba’s place, his associate Otho had been hailed emperor by the Praetorian Guard after he sagely promised its men the expected donative. Otho was not a popular choice in some quarters. Aged thirty-six, he was ambitious, slippery, overweight, and vain—he wore an expensive wig to hide his premature baldness. Of particular interest to Vespasian was the fact that Otho appointed Vespasian’s brother Flavius Sabinus to be his city prefect, returning him to the powerful post as chief of Rome’s police and firefighters that he’d held under Nero. On learning all this, Vespasian’s son Titus decided to turn about and return to his father at Caesarea with the news. Agrippa chose to continue on to Rome, where he had a family palace, to pay respects to new emperor Otho on his behalf and on Vespasian’s behalf.
On the Rhine, the eight legions in Rome’s two German provinces disapproved of Otho’s appointment. The four legions in the province of Lower Germany hailed their proconsul Aulus Vitellius emperor in competition with Otho, then sent delegates to the legions in Upper Germany and convinced them to also salute Vitellius emperor. The empire now had two emperors, Otho and Vitellius. As Vitellius prepared to send elements from his eight legions to Rome to take the throne from Otho, the 1st Italica Legion marched to Italy from Gaul to support Otho. Meanwhile, the legions in Moesia and Pannonia vowed allegiance to Otho and also sent troops marching to Italy to support him. Leading the troops from Moesia were the 3rd Gallica Legion’s six cohorts that had recently gained fame for slaughtering the Roxolani raiders.
On March 14, as Vitellius’s Rhine army marched on Italy in several columns led by his subordinates, two columns marched out of Rome to do battle with them in Otho’s name. Otho’s columns comprised troops of the Praetorian Guard, German Guard, survivors of the 1st Legion of the Fleet, more sailors lately pressed into service as soldiers, and the troops that had been summoned to Rome earlier by Nero. Two thousand professional gladiators were even brought into Otho’s ranks. One of these columns headed for the south of France to terminate support for Vitellius in Gaul. The other aimed to head off the Vitellianist army just then entering Italy from the northwest.
Spirits in Otho’s Italian column were buoyed when the force was joined by experienced troops who had marched from Pannonia to support Otho; three cohorts of the 13th Gemina Legion and three from the 14th Gemina Martia Victrix Legion, the latter a unit famous for leading the termination of the British revolt led by Boudicca eight years earlier. Morale elevated even more when the Roman general who’d defeated the rampaging Britons in AD 60–61, Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, joined the column and was given overall command by Otho, who arrived late from Rome leading another new, untried legion, the 1st Adiutrix, or 1st Supporter Legion, which had been raised in Gaul the previous year to support late emperor Galba, a unit whose men were “high-spirited and eager to gain their first victory,” according to Tacitus.68
Early skirmishes in Gaul and northern Italy went Otho’s way before, on April 15, at Bedriacum in central Italy, Otho’s army and the Vitellianist army met on the main highway and did battle. Vitellius’s army of battle-hardened Rhine legionaries, considered the best troops in the Roman army, overwhelmed the mostly inexperienced Othonist troops. The 14th Gemina Martia Victrix held its ground when others ran, but even it was forced to surrender.
Otho escaped, but even though more legions arrived from the Balkans overnight to support him, the following day, April 16, he committed suicide. All Otho’s troops then capitulated, leaving Vitellius sole emperor of Rome. He would only enter the capital in July, disbanding the current Praetorian Guard for opposing him and filling the unit with his best legionaries, and sending far away other units that had fought bravely for Otho—the 14th Gemina Martia Victrix, for example, was ordered back to its old station in Britain, while the 1st Adiutrix was sent to Spain.
Vespasian knew Vitellius well. Both had survived under Caligula and prospered under Claudius. Grossly overweight, bisexual with a notorious boyfriend, and with a severe limp as a result of his boyhood friend Caligula driving a racing chariot into him, Vitellius had become more interested in feasting than governing. When news of Otho’s death reached the East, the governor of Syria, Mucianus, wrote to Vespasian urging him to oppose the vice-ridden Vitellius and claim the throne for himself.
As Vespasian considered the idea, and after relocating his headquarters from Caesarea to Beirut, he went to Mount Carmel, home to a grotto housing a famous oracle, and sought the oracle’s advice. There, too, he met with Mucianus, who told him that the king of Parthia, Vologases, had offered forty thousand horse archers to help him take the Roman throne—Mucianus had clearly already sounded out the Parthian ruler on the idea. Vespasian declined the Parthian offer, but the oracle of Mount Carmel seems to have encouraged the general’s hopes, and after meeting with his officers and receiving their unanimous support, he wrote to Tiberius Alexander, prefect of Egypt, with a request, and Mucianus returned to Syria.
On July 4, Prefect Alexander convened an assembly of his two resident legions, the full 3rd Cyrenaica Legion and the four cohorts of the new 18th Legion, at which they swore allegiance to Vespasian as their emperor. Eight days later, the three legions currently based in Syria, the 4th Scythica, 6th Ferrata, and 12th Fulminata, assembled on the orders of Mucianus and likewise hailed Vespasian as emperor. The legionaries stationed in various parts of Judea, including the men of the lone remaining cohort of the 3rd Gallica as well as the 5th Macedonica, 10th Fretensis, and 15th Apollinaris Legions, immediately followed suit. Rome again had two emperors.
Soon, word reached the West that nine legions of the East had hailed Vespasian their emperor. Immediately, the six cohorts of the 3rd Gallica Legion currently on the Danube came out for Vespasian, and as their senior officers argued about what they should do, the legionaries set off to march on Rome under their chief centurion Arrius Varus, planning to gather other troops around them as they went. The 7th Galbiana Legion joined them, led by a convicted forger who had been kicked out of the Senate, Marcus Antonius Primus. An energetic fast-talker, Primus had been given command of the 7th Galbiana just months before by Galba. Primus, who significantly outranked Varus, took charge of the combined units. Making Varus his deputy, Primus led the march to Italy to depose Vitellius.
Meanwhile, in Syria, Proconsul Mucianus was also putting together a task force to place Vespasian on the throne at Rome. He called up thirteen thousand retired Evocati reservists living in the province and, adding these veterans to the complete 6th Ferrata Legion and auxiliaries, commenced preparations for an overland march to Rome. Vespasian also withdrew two thousand legionaries from his legions in Judea and sent them marching north to join Mucianus in Antioch for the Italian campaign. All up, Mucianus would take nearly thirty thousand men to Italy. At the same time, Vespasian wrote to Marcus Antonius Primus, telling him to wait for Mucianus and his troops to join him before advancing on Rome, at which time he wanted Mucianus to take charge of their combined forces.
Vespasian and son Titus now relocated to Alexandria, from where Vespasian could control the vital grain supply to Rome. He would only sail to Italy once Mucianus had dealt with Vitellius. But there was a fly in the ointment. Primus had no intention of waiting for or answering to Mucianus. Intending to push on to Rome with his own troops, he knew that in Britain, the rank and file had come out for Vespasian, but their centurions supported Vitellius, so Britain’s legions were staying put. In Spain, the 1st Adiutrix Legion led the 6th Victrix and 10th Gemina Legions in swearing loyalty to Vespasian, but they were too far away to affect a fight in Italy. But on the Rhine, Vitellius’s remaining tens of thousands of legionaries were still solidly behind the emperor they had created. So, Primus devised a cunning plan to prevent reinforcements reaching Vitellius from the Rhine and so protect his own back.
Primus knew that Vespasian had an old friend on the Rhine. Julius Civilis was a Batavian noble who served as a prefect commanding a Batavian auxiliary cohort attached to the legions that had invaded Britain in AD 43. Fighting alongside Vespasian’s 2nd Augusta Legion back then, Civilis had befriended Vespasian. “My respect for Vespasian is longstanding,” Civilis himself would write in AD 70. “While he was still a subject (of other emperors), we were called friends.”69
Primus wrote several letters to Civilis, suggesting he foment trouble on the Rhine to tie up Vitellius’s troops there, as a favor to Vespasian. Civilis would grab this suggestion and run with it. The revolt he unleashed later that year rolled along the Rhine and saw several of Vitellius’s legions defect to the rebel cause. Primus’s “diversion” was to prove too successful as far as Vespasian was concerned. It certainly prevented reinforcements reaching Vitellius in Italy, but it threatened to permanently destroy Roman control on the Rhine and in Gaul, and would ultimately require Vespasian to mount a major military operation to defeat Civilis and his rebel allies.
Civilis’s chief ally in the Rhine uprising was Julius Classicus, a noble of the Treveri, a Belgic tribe occupying the lower Moselle River Valley. The Treveri had been conquered by Julius Caesar a century before this and ever since had provided auxiliaries to the Roman army, including highly valued cavalry. Like Civilis, Classicus had served as a prefect commanding auxiliaries for Rome. In AD 61 he’d arrived in Britain from the Rhine as prefect of the 6th Nerviorum Cohort, a light infantry unit filled by men from the Nervii, another Belgic tribe. With two other auxiliary cohorts, Classicus and his men had cleaned up London following its destruction by Boudicca’s rebels and then built a new London fort on Watling Street. While the 6th Nerviorum would remain in Britain until the fifth century, Classicus was back on the Rhine by the time of Civilis’s revolt. He is likely to have known Vespasian’s son Titus when both had served on the Rhine.70
In Italy, Primus and his deputy Centurion Varus, disregarding Vespasian’s order to wait for Mucianus, marched in the early autumn into Italy, gathering disgruntled former Praetorian guardsmen and entire legions such as the 7th Claudia and 8th Augusta to Vespasian’s banner en route. On October 24 at Bedriacum, the very same place where Otho had been defeated just months before, Primus’s troops defeated an army sent by Vitellius to intercept them. Many men from Vitellius’s army fled to the nearby city of Cremona, which was bulging with visitors attending its annual fair.
Primus surrounded and assaulted Cremona that same day, soon breaking into it. While he himself then took a bath, Primus’s troops and thousands of camp followers were let loose in Cremona. Being non-Italians, Primus’s legionaries had no sympathy for the Italians of Cremona who had given refuge to enemy troops. Led by the sun-worshipping Syrians of the 3rd Gallica Legion, Primus’s men raped and looted their way through the city, taking many civilians as their personal slaves. When Primus subsequently banned this enslavement of Roman citizens, the legionaries put their prisoners to death rather than free them. More than forty thousand civilians died at Cremona.
Primus’s army then marched on the capital. Struggling through the snows covering the Apennine Mountains north of Rome, Primus and his troops were only within striking distance of the city by mid-December. In the city, the city prefect, Vespasian’s brother Sabinus, prematurely declared allegiance to Vespasian and led the troops of the Night Watch in occupying the Capitoline Mount, with Vespasian’s youngest son, Domitian, and Sabinus’s son Clemens sheltering with him. The German Guard, the then imperial bodyguard, laid siege to the Capitoline Mount to prove its loyalty to Vitellius. In the process, they set fire to the Temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest, Rome’s oldest and largest temple. The building, many treasures stored inside, and the other structures on the hill were destroyed by the fire.
From north of the city, Quintus Petilius Cerialis, a relative of Vespasian by marriage and a client of his, set off with a thousand cavalry provided by Primus with the aim of breaking into Rome, reaching the Capitol, and saving Vespasian’s son, brother, and nephew. Previously watched over by Vitellius because of his connection with Vespasian, Cerialis had escaped from Rome disguised as a farmer, linking up with Primus just after his army crossed the Apennines. While Primus and his troops continued on down the Flaminian Way from the north at a pace dictated by its baggage train, Cerialis diverted to the Salarian Way with his speedy cavalry, aiming to enter Rome from the northeast and surprise Vitellianist defenders.
Cerialis was notoriously rash. Nine years earlier, while commander of the 9th Hispana Legion in Britain, he’d led his troops into an ambush by Boudicca’s rebels. He had lost two thousand legionaries and only escaped death himself by galloping away. Now, anxious to save Sabinus and Domitian, he blundered into unfamiliar winding alleys and gardens in Rome’s northeastern suburbs, where Vitellius’s troops ambushed him. Many of Cerialis’s troopers turned and fled. Some were captured. Cerialis himself made an ignominious retreat.
With Cerialis’s rescue attempt a failure, the fate of Vespasian’s brother was sealed. On the burning Capitoline Mount, Sabinus’s Night Watch troops, former slaves, were no match for the elite German guardsmen, who overwhelmed them. Sabinus was captured and beheaded, although Domitian and Sabinus’s son managed to escape disguised as adherents of the god Isis. They were subsequently hidden in the city home of one of the family’s freedmen.
As soon as Primus and his army reached Rome, they attacked its walls and closed gates. After several days of heavy fighting, they forced an entry into the city. The German Guard made a last stand at the Castra Praetoria, castle-like barracks of the Praetorian Guard, fighting to the last man. More than fifty thousand soldiers on both sides died in the taking of Rome. Domitian and his cousin were safely secured by Primus, and on December 21, the quaking emperor Vitellius was discovered alone at his Palatium on the Palatine, hiding in an “unseemly” place, according to Tacitus’s Histories—a janitor’s room, with a dog tethered outside the door, according to Suetonius’s Twelve Caesars. Dragged out by a tribune of either the City Guard or Night Watch, the emperor of eight months was put to death while begging for his life. The following day, the Senate met and pro claimed Vespasian emperor, conferring the rank of consul on Vespasian’s conquering general Primus.
Mucianus and his army from the East reached Rome very shortly after. En route, Mucianus’s force had fortuitously intercepted a Sarmatian invasion across the Danube in Moesia and mercilessly quashed it. Mucianus had also dispatched one of his officers, Virdius Geminus, with an Evocati detachment and a squadron of Liburnians he’d based at the city of Byzantium to deal with the Anicetus Revolt in Pontus. Anicetus, a freedman of the late King Polemon II of Pontus, had risen up with a band of supporters and slaughtered the cohort of Roman troops stationed in Pontus since AD 64. Previously serving the king, the men of this cohort had been granted Roman citizenship by Nero. Claiming to be supporting Vitellius, Anicetus had gone on to burn ships docked at Trapezus. But his revolt proved shortlived. While trying to escape Geminus, Anicetus was captured by local tribesmen at the mouth of the Cohibus River (today’s Enguri) and handed over to his Roman pursuers. Geminus executed Anicetus, and stability was returned to Pontus in Vespasian’s name.
Immediately upon reaching the capital, Mucianus assumed the reins of power, sidelining Primus. He would wield that power until Vespasian arrived. Mucianus also promptly took Vespasian’s son Domitian under his wing, and directed seven legions to converge on the Rhine to deal with Civilis’s revolt. Vespasian’s relative Petilius Cerialis was sent ahead with the 21st Rapax Legion and auxiliaries, while the remaining troops marched from several provinces. Given this last chance to prove himself, Cerialis would not fail Mucianus or his emperor. It would be a grueling campaign, but in a series of AD 70 battles, Cerialis would terminate the rebellion and reclaim the Rhine for Rome. His reward from Vespasian would be a return to Britain in AD 71 as the province’s new governor, a role he would perform with distinction.
Meanwhile, hearing that power had gone to the head of Antonius Primus, who had secretly proposed putting another leading senator on the throne, Mucianus quickly deprived Primus of his power base by sending his 7th Galbiana Legion back to the Balkans and sending the six cohorts of the 3rd Gallica Legion marching overland home to Syria. Primus’s able deputy Varus was removed from the 3rd Gallica and made superintendent of Rome’s grain supply. Primus himself was dispatched by Mucianus to Alexandria to see his emperor. There, Vespasian would treat Primus courteously, but Primus and power would no longer be bedmates; he would receive no more government appointments. A decade and a half later he would be living in quiet retirement and be mentioned by the poet Martial.
And so closed the infamous Year of the Four Emperors, with the civil war that had torn the Roman Empire asunder now at an end. As soon as word reached Vespasian in Alexandria in January of AD 70 that hostilities had been terminated in Italy and he was now officially emperor, he ordered preparations made for a crossing of the seas to Italy in the summer. He then appointed Caesennius Paetus to replace Mucianus as governor of Syria. This was the very same Paetus who’d performed so badly in Armenia years before, but he was a client of Vespasian, having married Vespasian’s niece Sabina, daughter of his late brother Sabinus.
Vespasian also gave his son Titus a mission—return to Judea, this time as Roman commander in chief, and complete the task they had jointly embarked upon three years earlier: the conquest of Jerusalem.