The Twelve Caesars Read online

  He forfeited popularity. He had antagonized the senate and distanced the people by long absence from Rome. His misdeeds were all known, the tally (beginning with those murders in his own family) a long and painful one. He had squandered the riches of empire, the loyalty of troops and commons alike. Not Claudius’ divinity, Germanicus’ lustre or the distant shadow of Augustus availed him now. In the spring of 68, a provincial governor of high birth and old-fashioned inclinations issued a proclamation repudiating Nero. In the aftermath of Galba’s bid for the purple, Dio writes, Nero found himself ‘abandoned by everybody alike’.22

  In the first instance, the historian overstates the case. Nero responded with calmness and indifference to the news of Galba’s revolt – and did nothing. Inertia was the expression of his contempt. Was he drugged by detachment, too lost in the echoing chambers of his private world of Greek triumphs to recall himself to the business of Rome? In truth he had been absent for a long time. He declared himself sole consul for the year, unaware of the irony of seeking refuge in the tatters of Republican office-holding. He summoned legions from Britain and Illyricum and made plans to supplement their numbers with sailors stationed at Misenum. By the time he took decisive action, it was too late. A part of him wanted it that way. He wanted to escape to Egypt but there was no one left who would go with him. The Praetorians had defected, Nymphidius Sabinus resorting to bribery in their transfer of allegiance to Galba. In this Rome of the principate, loss of the Praetorians probably amounted to an insuperable obstacle. In the garden of Livia’s villa at Prima Porta, where a laurel sprig received by the old Augusta as a portent had grown into a hedge supplying branches for wreaths, the laurels were dying. There would be no more crowns for Augustus’ heirs, no more garlands for scions of the Julii or the Claudii; that day was past.

  Events were pressing in on Nero. The palace, when at length he returned to it, stood empty. It had to be so, in Suetonius’ story the figure of a forlorn emperor lost among empty rooms and echoing corridors repeatedly an image of tyranny unmasked. Nero fled to the house of a freedman outside Rome. Sporus was among the small party who accompanied him. Disguised as a slave, Nero bore little resemblance to the young man who, fourteen years earlier, had roamed Roman streets at night in pursuit of easy violence and cheap thrills. An excess of good living had made him bloated and waddling; the sway of early good looks was all gone. When the moment came, the surfeit of self-indulgence even stopped him from steeling himself for suicide.

  He played the last scene badly, this emperor whose reign is bequeathed to us as a series of gaudy tableaux vivants. A slave steadied his hand as he plunged a dagger deep into his neck: perhaps this understudy even made the fatal stroke for him. Bulging in agony, in those final seconds Nero’s goggle eyes were not accorded any clarity of vision. He went to his grave still in a state of self-delusion. ‘What an artist the world loses in me!’ he gasped. Thanks to the public nature of kingship, there were those on hand to record his dying fall. He knew better at any rate than to ask with Augustus if he had done well in his role in the comedy of life.

  GALBA

  (3 BC–AD 69)

  ‘Equal to empire had he never been emperor’

  Galba: Servius Sulpicius Galba Roman emperor, murdered by Otho, Mary Evans Picture Library

  Galba was an old man, a childless widower. Inflexible and gouty, of middle height and stooping, skull-faced and hook-nosed, hands and feet distorted with age, bald as an egg, but still, rising seventy-three, in thrall to primitive lusts and evil counsellors, this aristocratic son of a dwarfish hunchback betrayed the weaknesses of age but none of the spirit of the age. His seven-month reign overlapped Nero’s life by a single day in June 68: he was stern in his rejection of Nero’s legacy.

  In this year of tumult (Nero dead, Vespasian a distant prospect), a secret of empire was revealed. It was Tacitus who made this grandiloquent pronouncement. An emperor could be created elsewhere than at Rome (championed by legions and a groundswell of disaffection carefully exploited: bribes in the right places, the senate tactfully wooed – these conditions Tacitus omitted). There were other revelations, too, in the maelstrom of Nero’s fall, namely that the principate was not an old man’s game nor responsive to old-fashioned ideas of empire, though these would emerge only later. ‘What mean you, fellow soldiers? I am yours and you are mine’ is one version of Galba’s dying words. But he was wrong. Galba did not belong to the soldiers nor they to him. Vigorous in mind he may have been, as Dio insists; also marked for greatness from childhood by none other than Augustus, as Suetonius offers; even an ‘excellent prince’: yet his political instincts were fallible. At the moment of acclamation he had disdained to pay the troops’ accession donative: as a result, their loyalty clung to the memory of Augustus’ open-handed progeny. Miserly and sour with rectitude, Galba remained a geriatric usurper.

  As he sowed, so in time he reaped. No matter that his reign had been presaged in 200-year-old prophecies: omens were not breastplates and Galba’s head would be hacked from his body by those with no interest in the numinous. Perhaps Galba’s flaw was that, at a time for new departures, and in the light of Tacitus’ ‘secret’, he remained in every important respect a quintessentially Roman creation: his mental landscape extended no further than the city of his birth. His were Republican qualities. His virtues were as austere and uncompromising as that Republican visual idiom he embraced in his portraiture, an imagery of patrician remoteness and heroic hauteur, sunken cheeks, furrowed brow, lips tight with disapproval: the clock turned back, an eschewal of populist deceits. But the Republic was dead – one of Galba’s own family, opposed to Julius Caesar, had joined the conspiracy of Brutus and Cassius and died in its defence; and the idealized good looks of Augustus and his successors suited better the paternalism at the heart of the principate. Tacitus’ summary is pithy: ‘He was ruined by his old-fashioned inflexibility, and by an excessive sternness which we are no longer able to endure.’1

  Not unusually, Suetonius’ Galba is attended by portents throughout his long life. At the moment of greatest daring, forsaking the easy backwater of provincial governorship for fully armed conspiracy, he sees a foaling mule. And so his reign is foretold (as his grandfather had said it would be), bounty born of barrenness: impossible to turn back now or resist. It is the sort of logic-defying natural phenomenon the Romans loved as an alternative clairvoyance. In this, one of Suetonius’ bleakest portraits, that miracle of the arid made fertile seems at odds with the aura of desiccation which emerges from Galba’s rigid record. Suetonius suggests that we are wrong to regard him thus, wizened beyond any quickening of the blood, inhuman with age, though it is his own behaviour as emperor which compels this assessment. His appetite, he notes, foraging for examples, was impressive. In winter, his heavy eating began even before daybreak (for age did not prevent him from early rising and long days of endeavour in Rome’s service). Impressive, too, in a man unable to endure the pressure of shoes on gout-swollen feet, were his intermittent sexual athletics. His homosexuality was of Rome’s taboo-breaking variety: a preference for strong, full-grown men over the pert-arsed youths who were traditionally the older Roman’s quarry. Suetonius offers a single, striking instance. News that the senate had ratified Galba’s accession was delivered by his freedman and bedfellow (and former prisoner of Nero) Icelus. Overcome with the exhilaration of the moment, this dry-lipped old martinet took Icelus to one side and quickly fucked him. For his indignity, Icelus was rewarded with a leg-up to the knighthood.

  Yet Galba’s appetites, in contrast to those who had gone before, were neither omnivorous nor unrestrained. His response to Icelus was at variance with his reaction to Agrippina the Younger three decades earlier. That ambitious termagant set her cap at Galba during the latter’s marriage to Aemilia Lepida (probably at the time Claudius made good a bequest to Galba of fifty million sesterces from the empress Livia, unpaid by Tiberius and Gaius).2 Galba not only resisted the advances of the future empress, but failed to interve
ne when, at a gathering of Roman matrons, to considerable scandal his mother-in-law slapped her for her temerity. Given Agrippina’s ability to cling to a grudge, this robust vignette may account for the relative quietness of Galba’s career during the second half of Claudius’ reign, as well as his later attitude towards Nero, Agrippina’s son.

  Indulgent only to his intimates, forbearing with friends and freedmen, forbidding in demeanour, Galba extolled the discipline of former times. If only he could have summoned to his cause an illusion of barrack-room camaraderie. But he was always the general and never the soldier. He took no pleasure in bloodshed, yet was liberal with the death sentence; without recourse to torture, still he killed. Once a soldier on an expedition sold his rations at an extortionate rate. Galba ordered that should the guilty man fall hungry, none must feed him. Hunger struck and the soldier starved to death. On another occasion, he cut off the hands of a dishonest moneylender and nailed them to his counter. The very chill of his authority is sinister. Even the lessons he had learned from Augustus’ example misfired: a preference for simple living and lip-service to Republican nostalgia. In Galba’s case, lack of ostentation compounded his reputation for meanness, his refusal to put on the raiment of magnificence which fitted the emperor’s role; while the Republic he coveted was one of martial vigour in which the ordinary Roman was no more than a cog in a wheel, wooed with little bread and fewer circuses. He had no truck with Nero’s sumptuous profligacy, those extravagant displays in the theatre, the nights of gaudy subversion when misrule torched the streets of Rome with blazing hedonism – though as a young man he had distinguished himself in the praetorship with a novel innovation at the Floralian Games: elephants walking a tightrope. The taste for whimsy was short-lived. Little wonder that, as Suetonius tells us, he ‘incurred the hatred of almost all men of every class’. This rapid dégringolade took seven months, only five of which were spent in Rome.

  Like the protagonist in a work of literature, the Galba of the sources contains within himself seeds of his own downfall: character as plot. Historians traditionally ascribe to him a trio of mistakes: his brutal purges of the army; his refusal to pay the soldiers’ donative; his misguided choice of successor. Each arises from discernible character traits: the love of discipline, money and noble birth. As a combination they failed to win adherents and cost Galba his reputation and his life. Compared with that of his predecessors, Galba’s was a throne without foundations, built on a fragile consensus at a moment of crisis and unable, even at the outset, to unite all factions (the legions in Germany, as we shall see, offered support that was at best grudging). Nero had fallen despite every safeguard of the Julio-Claudian inheritance. How easily then might Galba, lacking those entitlements, fall too.

  Did Galba understand that secret of empire revealed by Tacitus – or did he justify his elevation as the deserts of aristocratic birth? Certainly he failed to grasp the extent to which emperor-making powers belonged not to the would-be emperor (a mistake also made by Otho) but to those legions whose focus of loyalty was not Rome, the Empire or even a concept of Roman greatness but the present incumbent of the throne – a symbol. With Nero’s death, the thread that bound Rome’s scattered armies to the Palatine momentarily snapped. For Galba, loyalty was not a prize to be won but an enforceable aspect of military discipline. And so, recognizing its importance, he refused to fix the broken connection, prepared neither to bribe his soldiers with gifts of money nor to tender for their favour: ‘I levy my soldiers, I do not buy them.’ A comatose senate, accustomed now to fear and fawning, could no longer help him: there is evidence that eminent men, more aware than Galba of the direction the wind was blowing, hung back from supporting his ever-tottering regime. First in Germany, afterwards in the East, the thanes flew from him. His was assuredly not the spirit of the age.

  It might have been different in the absence of a fourth mistake, namely the counsel he kept. Galba’s consilium was effectively shrunk to a body of three. With certain irony Suetonius referred to these trusted, all-powerful attendants who never left his side as his ‘tutors’. They were a curious trio, lambasted for corruption though none of the sources offers evidence. Successfully they held the world at bay for Galba. First, that burly bedfellow Icelus, who rewarded himself for pains in the discharge of duty by enriching himself at breakneck speed, the gains all his, the opprobrium for his misdeeds Galba’s. Second, Titus Vinius and, third, Cornelius Laco, ‘the one most worthless, the other most spiritless’, according to Tacitus.3 Vinius was a low-grade senator, ‘a man of unbounded covetousness’. His claim to the emperor’s ear rested on the sort of military experience and provincial governorship guaranteed to appeal to Galba; he had led Galba’s army and his record as governor was a good one. The charms of Laco, ‘intolerably haughty and indolent’ in Suetonius’ account, are less easily fathomed: his overriding characteristic was a knee-jerk need to oppose any plan not his own. Inexperience notwithstanding, Galba would appoint him Praetorian prefect. Perhaps he intended to retain effective control of the imperial guard himself, Laco no more than a cipher.

  Stubborn and intractable, ‘so weak and so credulous’, as Tacitus dismissed him, the old man too often allowed himself to be guided by these gimcrack intimates, negligent of the odour of nefariousness that tainted each of them and compounded his own quickly acquired reputation for cruelty. Probably all three were more intelligent than contemporary sources are prepared to acknowledge: their success depended on successfully directing Galba and manipulating that intransigence which was one result of his age and outlook. If so, their intelligence was of a small-beer variety. At loggerheads with one another, ‘being at variance and in smaller matters pursuing their own aims’, Icelus, Vinius and Laco advised the emperor badly.4 ‘He so entrusted and handed himself over as their tool,’ Suetonius writes, ‘that his conduct was far from consistent: for now he was more exacting and niggardly, and now more extravagant and reckless, than became a prince chosen by the people and of his time of life.’ In his downfall, they met their own day of reckoning.

  On his death, the senate voted Galba a statue to be erected on a column where he was slain in the Forum. This commission was vetoed by Vespasian. Almost no physical record of Galba survives. His significance lies rather in the nature of his election to the principate and his symbolic role as an interim princeps. The Galba of the records is poised between the old world of the Augustan diarchy – accepting autocracy, hiding behind pious regret for the Republic, that deceit, ‘good’ and ‘bad’, Julio-Claudians had relished or reviled by turns – and a new world in which a ruler championed by the military worked for the good of the Empire and the support of his troops. It may be that, in unsettled times, Galba’s disastrous record – his alienation of the troops and those fellow provincial governors who had made him Rome’s seventh Caesar, added to his inability to win over the senate or the people of Rome – preserved the principate. For as Otho would correctly discern, it was Galba’s government which retrospectively lessened Nero’s sting, Galba’s stern misjudgements which contextualized the tyrannous folly of the last of Augustus’ heirs, Galba’s icy rectitude which glamorized Rome’s first dynasty. It was not by accident that Vespasian and his sons, the second dynasty of Rome, made manifest in public as well as private their connections to their eccentric, imperious predecessors (albeit they assiduously gave Nero a wide berth).

  For his part, Galba was predisposed to look backwards. Born on 24 December 3 BC, in a house in the country near Tarracina southeast of Rome, Servius Sulpicius Galba was the younger son of a family whose distinction outclassed that of Augustus and his haughty clan (with notable exceptions: Livia and Domitius Ahenobarbus, for example). His family tree – in time prominently displayed in the emperor’s atrium – traced lines of descent from Jupiter on his father’s side and, on his mother’s side, King Minos’ wife Pasiphae, whose unnatural passion for Poseidon’s white bull perhaps suggested to Galba’s contemporaries his own invert’s desire for thick-necked male lovers. I
n 68, such a parade of ancestral renown deliberately recalled the atria of Republican Rome, with their galleries of wax masks, as well as the Julian claim to descent from Venus. For the record of the Sulpicii Galbae was one of Republican eminence. The Servius Galba who, in 145 BC, became consul of Rome, was acclaimed by Suetonius as ‘decidedly the most eloquent speaker of his time’. (Time would show that his descendant had inherited the name without the gifts.) Rome’s seventh Caesar cherished, too, the legacy of his great-grandfather Quintus Catulus Capitolinus, consul in 78 BC, called ‘Capitolinus’ on account of his role in rebuilding the temple on the Capitoline, which he dedicated in 69 BC. We are told that Galba clung to Capitolinus’ memory – he may have requested the inclusion of his name in his statue inscriptions – yet when his own turn came, he appeared uninterested in similar gestures of largesse. All his tastes were for retrenchment in the wake of Nero’s extravagance. Such frugality, admirable in origin, was none of the emperor’s part. It shows a muddleheadedness in reading the lessons of the past and the challenges of office. For all his preoccupation with pedigree – a blindness that would cost him dear – Galba overlooked the truth of the grandest families: that among the heroes and history-makers lurk numbskulls, nitwits, nonentities and the justly notorious. His own brother was among them: a petulant bankrupt who committed suicide when Tiberius found out his weakness. Enamoured of the past, Galba failed to respond to the changed circumstances of the present.