The Book of Ancient Bastards (18 page)

How Being Too Cheap to Pay Off Your Promised Bribes Can Be a Bad Idea

(3 B.C.– A.D. 68)

[Galba] seemed too great to be a subject so long as he remained a subject, and by general consent, he would have been a capable ruler, had he not ruled.
—Tacitus, The Histories

Servius Sulpicius Galba was born in 3 B.C. to a wealthy northern Italian family. Over the course of his life, he held a variety of military and government positions, earning a reputation for bravery and competency as both a military commander and as a civil servant. He was also cheap, short-sighted, inflexible, and a terrible judge of character. Unfortunately, these less-than-sterling character traits did not reveal themselves until after Galba became emperor. By that time, it was far too late for him to save himself from a violent end.

When Galba was governor of a province in Spain, a complicated series of events resulted in the Praetorian Guard deposing Nero (causing Nero’s suicide) and in Galba’s allies in Rome (many of them senators) seizing an opportunity.

They bribed the praetorians to accept Galba as emperor.

Once installed as emperor, Galba set about establishing and stabilizing his regime by trying to balance the imperial budget. For the previous thirteen years, Nero had spent lavishly on foolish projects, showering his favorites with largesse, and allowing his imperial freedmen (ex-slaves working as civil servants) to embezzle large sums of money. The predictable result was that Galba found himself saddled with a crushing debt.

Most of the measures Galba took did not go over well with the citizens (government takeaways rarely do). For example, the new emperor decreed that every cash giveaway Nero had made (and there were thousands on record) would need to be repaid to the tune of 90 percent. The grumbling began.

At the best of times, put forward by the most virtuous and honest of governments, this sort of decision would have been unpopular. But the government that implemented it was neither of these things. Once Galba assumed the imperial purple, all of those unscrupulous folks who had helped him expected to get a little piece of the action. They were not disappointed. Galba’s civil servants were, if anything, greedier and more open about their plundering the empire’s taxes reserves than Nero’s had been. One of Galba’s boyfriends (see sidebar) named Icelus is reputed to have pocketed more in a few months than Nero’s gang had managed to steal over the course of his entire reign!

When Galba tried to welsh on his deal with the praetorians and not pay them the cash bounty they had been promised, it was the last straw. Legions on the Rhine frontier mutinied. There was panic on the streets of Rome. When Galba went to the Forum to face down his opponents, he was thrown from his litter and stabbed to death.

Gay Bastard

Although ancient history is rife with stories of “great men” who had both female and male lovers, Galba was, according to that Mr. Blackwell of ancient Rome, Suetonius, unique among Rome’s early emperors in preferring men to women: “In sexual matters he was more inclined to males, and then none but the hard bodied and those past their prime.”

The Emperor as Scheming Pretty Boy

( A.D. 32–69)

When civil war in the balance lay, and mincing Otho might have won the day, bloodshed too costly did he spare the land, and pierced his heart with an unfaltering hand.
—Martial, Epigrams

One of Nero’s closest friends and confidants during the early years of his reign was a fashion-plate dilettante named Marcus Salvius Otho (the two men were rumored to have been lovers). Vain, shallow, and frivolous, Otho only survived Nero’s fall because he and the emperor argued over a woman (?!?). By A.D. 68, Otho found himself posted as governor of a frontier province in what is now Portugal, far from Rome and from the bloodbath that followed Nero’s death.

An early supporter of Galba’s coup, Otho expected to be selected as the elderly new emperor’s heir apparent. The fly in the ointment for the ambitious young man was the fact that Otho’s family were commoners, without the distinguished pedigree that Galba was seeking in a successor (in hopes of shoring up his regime while it was still in its infancy and thus vulnerable), so he was passed over for a rival whom Galba adopted as both his son and heir.

But Galba had recently committed an inexcusable blunder: he had stiffed Rome’s city police force (and the emperor’s personal bodyguard), the Praetorian Guard, out of the large cash bribe they’d been offered to pave the way for his march on Rome.

Seeing his chance, the wealthy Otho slipped into the praetorian camp and offered them a bribe of his own. Unlike Galba, he made good on his promise. The praetorians declared Otho emperor, and Galba was murdered in the Forum during the resulting riots.

As this was happening, one of the legions on the Rhine frontier mutinied and declared its general (a fat nobody named Vitellius) emperor. Vitellius’s legion marched on Rome. Otho sent his troops out to face them at the Po River in northern Italy. Vitellius’s forces won the resulting battle (the Battle of Bedriacum), routing Otho’s army and sending them reeling back to their master in Rome.

At this point, Otho either lost his nerve or developed a conscience. When news of the disaster reached him, the emperor sent his family word that they ought to do whatever it took to save themselves. The Roman historian Cassius Dio records a pretty speech (likely fabricated) that Otho made to his troops, deploring the possibility of civil war and determining to sacrifice himself rather than Roman soldiers to fight each other in his name.

Then he went to bed, only to rise the next morning and commit suicide by stabbing himself to death.

Foppish Bastard

Otho was notorious for going to great lengths where his appearance was concerned. As the gossipy Roman historian Suetonius tells us: “He had the hair of his body plucked out, and because of the thinness of his locks wore a wig. . . . Moreover, they say that he used to shave every day and smear his face with moist bread . . . so as never to have a beard.”

The Fat Bastard Who Tried
to Sell His Throne

( A.D. 12–69)

Seldom has the support of the army been gained by any man through honorable means to the degree that [Vitellius] won it through worthlessness.
—Tacitus, The Histories

Historians refer to the twelve months after the death of the emperor Nero as the “Year of four emperors,” because in the civil war that followed, several different claimants came forward to take the imperial throne.

The third of these emperors was arguably the least ambitious of the bunch, a notorious glutton and decades-long hanger-on at the imperial court who managed to flatter his way into a variety of lucrative political jobs serving under three different emperors. This was Aulus Vitellius, who had the misfortune to command a legion whose discipline crumbled away shortly after his greatest victory, largely because of his own bad decisions.

It can truthfully be said of Vitellius that it wasn’t his idea to become emperor. His troops started the whole thing by refusing to swear allegiance to the new emperor Galba and proclaiming Vitellius emperor. Two of his subordinates, the generals Fabius Valens and Aulus Caecina Alienus, sealed the deal by leading his advance guard into Italy.

It was Valens and Caecina who defeated the troops of the new emperor Otho at the Battle of Bedriacum. All Vitellius had to do was follow along as they made their way to Rome. Once there, Vitellius got himself proclaimed emperor by the senate, but the tide had already turned. Several legions along the northern and eastern frontiers declared for the general Vespasian, and he in his turn marched on Rome.

Before Vespasian got to Italy, Vitellius, like Otho before him, lost his nerve. He approached Vespasian’s older brother, Flavius Sabinus, one of the consuls for that year, who was barricaded along with a number of other of Vespasian’s supporters on the Capitoline Hill in Rome, and made a deal to surrender the throne to Vespasian, all in the name of peace (and a huge bribe). But the deal fell through because Vitellius’s Praetorian Guard wouldn’t allow him to follow through with his resignation, instead pushing him to turn on Sabinus, which he promptly did, ordering the temple where Sabinus and his followers had taken refuge burned down around their ears.

The move sealed Vitellius’s fate. When Vespasian’s soldiers came looking for him not long afterward, he was hiding in his gatekeeper’s quarters.

By that point it didn’t matter that none of it, from proclaiming himself emperor to betraying and killing the well-respected brother of one of his rivals, had been his idea. Vitellius paid the ultimate penalty: as Suetonius tells us, he was bound and dragged through the streets of Rome to the Gemonian Steps, where criminals were executed. There he was tortured and beheaded, with his headless body tossed into the Tiber.

Fat, Gimpy Bastard With a Gin Blossom Nose

Vitellius had a very distinctive appearance. According to the Roman biographer Suetonius, “He was in fact abnormally tall, with a face usually flushed from hard drinking, a huge belly, and one thigh crippled from being struck once upon a time by a four-horse chariot, when he was in attendance on Gaius as he was driving.”