The Twelve Caesars (29 page)

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. In 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.

Up to a point, his career maintained the lustre of his forebears. A survivor of five reigns and immensely rich to boot, he had served as consul in 33 and governor successively of Upper Germany
(an appointment by Gaius, following Gaetulicus’ conspiracy), Africa (at Claudius’ intervention) and, beginning in 60, Nearer Spain. (This last was a miscall on Nero’s part.
Suspicious of private citizens whose esteem soared too high, Nero nevertheless overlooked Galba’s lofty reputation on the grounds, Plutarch tells us, ‘that he was thought to be of a
gentle nature, and his great age gave an added confidence that he would always act with caution’.
⁵
) It was more than a case of boxes ticked and trouble avoided. Under Tiberius, Galba advanced
through the stages of the
cursus honorum
in orderly fashion (that canny old cynic of an emperor smiled at predictions of a glorious destiny for Galba in old age). He served Gaius, Claudius
and Nero without mishap. Although the
hallmarks of his governorships were his unrelenting military discipline, a legalistic frame of mind hardwired to inclemency and
undoubted personal incorruptibility, Plutarch, in his role of Galba’s apologist, records that he won golden words in Germany and Africa. Unenlightened, uncharismatic and solidly business-like
as his approach appears with hindsight, the proconsulship brought him triumphal regalia and a trio of priesthoods. Family background increased his prestige: certainly he himself thought so. After
three decades of public service, in the prominent display of his family tree he asserted his own superiority, trusting in the Roman belief in heredity; and aligned himself with the deified Julius
(both invincibly patrician, both claiming descent from the firmament). It was a dangerous raising of the bar. Caesar had exploited family grandeur not primarily in a spirit of self-congratulation,
but as part of a larger plan of legitimizing claims to pre-eminence based on solid achievement. A century after Caesar, in a world schooled to mistrust every claim of high birth bar the
Julio-Claudians’, Galba’s family tree was intended of itself to guarantee his reign. Predictably it failed.

For Galba was indeed an old man. All the sources remark on his age: his body twisted with arthritis; the peculiar, unexplained growth of skin that hung from the left side of his torso, held in
place by bandages; the hands unable to unroll documents; the gauntness of his face which accentuated the prominence of his nose (noble only in numismatic profile). Even the boy who attended him at
public sacrifices in Spain had snow-white hair, its colour transformed from that of youth to age in an instant by way of omen. Galba’s appearance, Tacitus and Dio agree, gave rise to ridicule
– more than that, disgust. Tacitus blames widespread lack of judgement in degraded times, a childish and superficial outlook in which emperors were valued for ‘the beauty and grace of
their persons’: we hear the historian’s
contempt.
⁶
But there was more to it than that. Galba’s age was noteworthy since it marked him out as a survivor. In
68 he was one of a handful of scions of the great senatorial families of the Republic to have escaped imperial purges. His real distinction was not the cartography of grandeur revealed in his
family tree, but his age, which in turn implied isolation. In his youth he had venerated customs of the past described by Suetonius as old and forgotten, including requiring his freedmen and slaves
to appear before him twice a day, ‘greeting him in the morning and bidding him farewell at evening, one by one’. Remote in outlook, mostly bereft of his peer group, this scrawny veteran
represented a vanished moment. His challenge was to resist turning back the clock... the lure of anachronisms... an approach to the principate informed by unreliable memories of the Republic.
‘As yet my strength is unimpaired,’ he responded to a courtier who congratulated him on his appearance of vigour. It was a quotation from Homer and suitably heroic, but sycophant and
emperor knew that both dissembled. Galba’s appearance betrayed his age and physical condition. Self-deluded, too arrogant to concern himself with popular feeling, he failed to recognize that
it was his age which shaped the instability of his regime, inspiring widespread and unsettling speculation about the identity of his successor – Suetonius claims this as the principal topic
of conversation across Italy. It was a further weight on the emperor’s shoulders. As we have seen, the burdens of empire weighed heavily on men far younger than Galba.

Last man standing is no basis for leadership choices. In 68, with Nero still on the throne, Galba could be presented as the obvious candidate to replace him (although this view was never
universal). Distinguished by his record of service, his proximity to the imperial house through five reigns and his unimpeachable
aristocracy, he ought to have lent his name
to the gentlest of revolutions. The adrenaline of the great endeavour of toppling Nero may have prevented far-sightedness. ‘The nobility of his birth and the perils of the times made what was
really indolence pass for wisdom,’ Tacitus claimed. ‘He seemed greater than a subject while he was yet in a subject’s rank, and by common consent would have been pronounced equal
to empire had he never been emperor.’
⁷
It is among the historian’s best-known epitaphs and acknowledges that, despite his mistakes, Galba,
like emperors before him and after him, was a victim as much as a villain.

The creation of an emperor outside Rome began with a letter from Gaul. Its author was himself a romanized Gaul of royal descent. Gaius Julius Vindex was provincial governor of
Gallia Lugdunensis. He would be dead within the year, killed for setting in motion a revolution. First steps included a rallying cry to fellow Gauls against conditions within the province and,
looking further afield, Nero’s inadequacies as emperor. To fellow governors, including Galba, Vindex dispatched overtures inviting support.

Encouraged by Vinius, Galba responded to Vindex’ invitation on 2 April 68. (It is likely that tentative consultation among provincial governors had occupied him in the interim.) At Nova
Carthago, he was acclaimed ‘General of the Senate and People of Rome’, a careful piece of equivocation which avoided such overtly imperial titles as ‘Caesar’ and
‘Augustus’. The import of this inflammatory, deliberately Republican-sounding salutation was clear nonetheless and is said to have caused the histrionic Nero to faint. Suetonius
justifies septuagenarian treachery on
the grounds that Galba had intercepted instructions from Nero ordering his own assassination, an explanation which smacks of revisionism
by Galban sympathizers at a later date. A more plausible catalyst is the death of Corbulo at Nero’s hands the previous year in the aftermath of victory in Armenia. That vindictive and
irrational murder may have suggested to Galba the extent of Nero’s erratic misanthropy, the uncertain rewards of service and the precariousness of his own position.

Like Vindex before him, Galba requested local assistance. First to offer support was the governor of Lusitania, Marcus Salvius Otho, a disaffected former confidant of Nero and exhusband of
Nero’s wife Poppaea. Next Tiberius Julius Alexander, prefect of Egypt. Tardier was the commander of the legions in Upper Germany, Lucius Verginius Rufus, who may have been influenced in his
protracted ambivalence by the overwhelming dislike of his troops for Galba.
⁸
His own legions’ first choice to replace Nero, Rufus twice refused to be acclaimed emperor by his men. Instead, as
he was bound to do, he put down Vindex’ revolt, at the end of which Vindex was forced to commit suicide.
⁸