The Twelve Caesars (32 page)

O
tho is Suetonius’ cursed Caesar, Plutarch’s and Tacitus’ too. The
accounts agree: the omens were against him. (Plutarch labels them ‘uncertain and of dubious origin’.
¹
) Surrounded at intervals by soothsayers and an astrologer whom Suetonius calls
Seleucus, Tacitus and Plutarch Ptolemaeus, Rome’s eighth Caesar ignored every prophecy and portent bar one: that he would escape Nero’s displeasure with his life and survive the last of
the Julio-Claudians to rule as emperor of Rome.

His reign of three months did not outlast the spring. It ended in suicide. His death was noble, heroic, in the grand traditions of a warlike Republic. In the sources its manly rhetoric has the
set-piece qualities of a scene from epic poetry or perhaps a history painting. Apparently a vigorous foil to the indolence of his life, Otho’s death comes down to us as the sort of incident
which once commended Roman history to British schoolrooms: lessons from one overweening empire appropriated in the service of another. ‘If I was worthy to be Roman emperor, I ought to give my
life freely for my country,’ Plutarch’s Otho tells his troops.
²
It is the spirit of Kitchener and Kipling and no parody is implied. Alone in
the light of a new dawn, uncomplaining, with apparently no thought of personal suffering, he stabbed himself through the heart – like a sacrificial offering, blood spilt
to prevent further bloodshed. Only a glass of water steadied his hand. He had first paid bequests to all his staff and destroyed correspondence incriminating to those he left
behind.

Titian painted Otho in the guise of a Renaissance prince. In the copy of that painting which survives, a sword hangs at his side, his cloak surmounts shining armour. His hair is thick and curly
(in fact he wore a wig), his arm strong and sinewy (his flesh was smooth from constant depilation); he appears heavily jowled, cheeks dark with a day’s growth of stubble (throughout his life
he used bread poultices to soften his skin and reduce facial hair). His expression is petulant, effete: so too the limpness of his pose, despite a stirring backdrop of mountains and penumbrous sky.
His appearance confirms the rumour told to Suetonius by his father, that such was Otho’s distaste for violence that the mere mention of the deaths of Brutus and Cassius made him shudder. He
is unconvincingly martial. Were it not for the manner of his death, the majority of his contemporaries would have agreed. ‘Believe me when I insist that I can die more honourably than I can
reign,’ he abjures his followers.
³
Ironically, his very death gave them reason to doubt him. For Otho, this tableau that is both intimate and universal represents a moment of apotheosis. It is
a refutation of former waywardness, turning his back on erstwhile mediocrity – surely not the same bandy-legged, splay-footed devotee of Isis who, harried by grievances, had asked pettishly,
‘What truck have I with impossible tasks?’ Or, perhaps, just such a one, giving up when the going gets tough.

Plutarch described Otho as womanly and unaccustomed to command, a recipe for cowardice, misjudgement and vacillation. In time, in power struggles that were wholly opportunistic, Otho’s
luxury and licentiousness would be pitted against the stingy disciplinarianism of Galba and the gluttony and drunkenness
of Vitellius: Hobson’s choice. It was a measure
of the depths to which Rome’s throne had sunk by the beginning of 69. ‘The most worthless of mortals had been selected... by some fatality to ruin the Empire,’ Tacitus growls of
Otho’s conflict with Vitellius.
⁴
Less sceptical sources agree. ‘For as regards prodigality, effeminacy, inexperience in war, and multiplicity of debts incurred in a previous state of
poverty, it was hard to say which of them had the advantage.’
⁵
Pique had provoked Otho’s coup; rashness undid him. Neither trait belonged in the arsenal of an emperor. In the first
instance Otho was the choice neither of senators nor of soldiers. The decision to rule was his own, taken without consultation or popular pressure (despite the inevitable charade of the
recusatio imperii
offered to the senate): meagre and selfish in its ambitions. Of similar origin was the bolder decision to abrogate power through suicide. But he made a good death and there
were signs that, with a carrying wind, Otho’s principate might have offered a variant of Vespasian’s middle way. Omens and the altar’s bloody entrails decreed otherwise.

For in truth there was nothing shiftless about Marcus Salvius Otho, big-spending, high-living, loose-loving. By force of will he had maintained the upward trajectory of his recent family
history. He did so not via the magistracies of the
cursus honorum
, as tradition demanded, but through close – some said very close – friendship with Nero, his near contemporary,
whom he first met at one of Claudius’ banquets. (Claudius had singled out for praise his father, Lucius Otho, after the latter foiled a conspiracy against the emperor’s life. For the
same reason a statue of Lucius decorated the palace, a rare mark of honour. Given the Romans’ belief in the dependability of genetics, Otho cannot have failed to benefit from his
father’s high repute.) When the time came, he was also assiduous in courting the favour of all and any who could serve him, ruthless in pursuit
of his goal.
‘Altogether [he] acted the slave to make himself the master,’ Tacitus records: the historian does not intend flattery.
⁶
Less laudable tactics included a flirtation with an influential
freedwoman comfortably past her sell-by date. Shamelessly, without regard to honesty or kindliness, he pursued this ageing court jade as a conduit to Nero. Determined, though to outward appearance
hell-bent on pleasure, Otho affected the courtier’s insouciance. His model is the swan, paddling furiously beneath the water’s smooth surface. His efforts succeeded, or he would not
find himself included in our survey. But victory was short-lived in the extreme, the minutes of his reign recorded on a butterfly’s wing-span. He died on 16 April 69, only days before his
thirty-seventh birthday and less than a hundred days after being hailed as emperor. Suetonius records the beaten breasts and self-immolation of his supporters in the wake of that gloriously Roman
death. His account comes closest to avoiding partisanship. For good measure he reports a claim that is substantiated by nothing in Otho’s life: ‘that he had put an end to Galba not so
much for the sake of ruling, as of restoring the republic and liberty.’

In the sources Otho benefits from his opposition to Vitellius. The Flavians rewrote the history of this year of lawlessness, condemning Vitellius, repudiating Nero. Then as now, Otho occupies
middle ground. With hindsight a man of straw, he was a secondary target in Flavian myth-making, the embodiment of the spirit of a misguided moment, no more – an aberrancy, when personal
desire superseded claims of birth, prestige, experience or the appetite for public service... and none considered restoration of the Republic and liberty. As we shall see, it was an accusation
Vespasian and his sons dare not countenance.

With civil war came innovation. If Galba was the emperor created outside Rome, Otho was the emperor created outside the ruling classes. We can reach our
own conclusion on which was the more radical outcome for precedent-loving Romans. His pinchpenny coup was masterminded by a freedman called Onomastus, an officer of the imperial bodyguard, Barbius
Proculus, and Veturius the subaltern. They were abetted in the first instance by a tiny handful of disaffected mercenaries. It was an act of daring which, questionable motives aside, ought not to
have succeeded. That it did so indicates inherent weaknesses in the system. Otho’s brief career did nothing to address those weaknesses. Like him, his successor was a man bent on personal
gain, propelled by a section of the military beyond his natural ability, in Vitellius’ case an emperor disposed only to the corruptibility of power. All that Vitellius had in his favour was a
decent bloodline.

Granted, Otho’s grandfather, also Marcus Salvius Otho, had been a senator. He was the first of his family to be so (his own mother, described as ‘lowly’, may have been a slave:
he owed his advancement, according to Suetonius, to Livia’s influence, a connection of sorts with the old regime). Originally the Othones came from Ferentium, descendants of Etruscan princes,
a family of ancient lineage and illustrious reputation. There is an echo here of the long-dead Maecenas, whose easy backsliding into lubricious extravagance was also a feature of Otho’s youth
(indeed, Lucius Otho regularly flogged his second son for un-Roman frailties). Such ‘distinction’ could not be guaranteed to impress senatorial Rome.

The principate, however, as we have seen, looked kindly on provincials and those born outside Rome’s aristocracy. Otho senior was evidently sufficiently wealthy to manage the
senate’s property qualification; his connection with Livia marks the
beginning of a relationship with the imperial court. In the next generation, Lucius Otho endeared
himself so successfully to Tiberius (whom he resembled physically) that people believed him to be the emperor’s son. Coquettish freedwomen aside, it would not have been difficult for the
younger Marcus Salvius Otho to gain admittance to palace life. But Otho did not stop at winning Nero’s friendship. Five years older than Agrippina’s son, he translated friendship into
influence, affinity based on shared interests and similarities (and any sexual liaison the men embarked on); Suetonius claims on his behalf that Otho ‘was privy to all the emperor’s
plans and secrets’, including Nero’s plan to kill his mother. It would be wrong at this stage to assume traitorous hankerings on Otho’s part. The sources are clear that he aspired
to the throne only once the bonds of friendship had been shattered, a process beginning in the late 50s. In the meantime, if his tastes inclined to power in the short term, he pinned his hopes on a
place in Nero’s
consilium.

Like Vespasian’s association with Narcissus, a relationship forged at the same time, Otho’s connection with Nero would become increasingly double-edged in the fluctuating political
climate of the period. As it happened, sexual jealousy destroyed their friendship long before Nero forfeited mastery of Rome. Following Nero’s death, in the unsettled and uncertain new world
in which everything was to play for, the
novus homo
from Ferentium maintained an accurate evaluation of his Neronian credentials. As emperor he allowed the people to hail him ‘Nero
Otho’; it was their own innovation and arose, it seems, spontaneously. Anticipating the outbreak of peace following his own accession – Otho issued coins with the unambiguous legend
‘Peace throughout the world’ (
pax orbis terrarum
)
⁷
– and correctly judging that Galba’s ham-fistedness had forced a reassessment of Nero’s true worth, he
capitalized on this change
of heart in Rome by assigning fifty million sesterces to the task of completing the Golden House. Suetonius claims it as the first document Otho
signed as emperor.
⁹
Co-architect of this monument to Julio-Claudian grandeur, Otho perhaps hoped to acquire by association an aura of
legitimacy.

When it happened, Otho’s route to power was anything but circuitous. It came about through a double jealousy, first of Nero, second of that honourable but unremarkable
aristocratic exile Piso Licinianus. Otho’s response in each case consisted of an act of revenge. Revenge twice taken, he found himself emperor of Rome.

The process began in 58 or 59. Nero dispatched Otho to Portugal as governor of Lusitania. It was a significant appointment for a man of twenty-six or twenty-seven yet to undertake the
praetorship (the usual stepping-stone to provincial governorship). But it was not a compliment. On the contrary, Nero intended the appointment as an act of banishment. It was an alternative to
executing Otho and it owed its authorship to the tactful intervention of Seneca in what was an altogether unstatesmanlike squabble.

The circumstances of the falling-out of emperor and acolyte are characteristic of the dog days of Julio-Claudianism. The argument centred on one of those ambitious and imperious
women who, beginning in the reign of Claudius, exploited high breeding and good looks to achieve access to a power which they were neither constitutionally entitled to nor
temperamentally suited to. In this case Poppaea Sabina, sometimes called the Younger (her mother was that Poppaea Sabina the Elder whose beauty had earned even Tacitus’ commendation and who
had been forced in 47 to commit suicide by Claudius’ third wife Messalina, another of the type). Although the sources tell a confusing story, it appears that Poppaea, as beautiful as her
mother and ambitious to boot, was married to Otho. Frequently in the emperor’s presence on account of the closeness of Otho and Nero’s friendship, she attracted the latter’s
attention and the two embarked on a flirtation. (The alternative version has Otho marrying Poppaea specifically in order to make her available to Nero, then repenting too late of the pander’s
course for which he does not have the stomach.) As emperors will – as we have seen with Octavian and Gaius and will see again with Domitian – Nero exercised a form of
droit de
seigneur
and took Poppaea from Otho. Events were not, however, as clean-cut as this suggests. Otho yielded one sexual partner to another with an ill grace and may have opposed the
couple’s marriage. For his part, Nero resented Otho’s continuing affection for the woman both men now claimed as their wife. Only Seneca’s solution of governorship of Lusitania
served to remove the troublesome Otho from the equation still in possession of his life. The strength of feeling on all sides is attested by the length of Otho’s sojourn in his westerly
retreat and by Nero’s failure to recall him in the aftermath of Poppaea’s death in 65. Suetonius suggests that Nero contented himself with Otho’s banishment as a form of damage
limitation less likely to inspire gossip about palace bed-hopping than any course more obviously
resembling retribution. Since Otho took the opportunity
‘promotion’ presented to fulfil the obligations of office with what the historian describes as ‘remarkable moderation and integrity’, his was the last laugh. As with
Vespasian’s later governorship of Judaea, Otho’s Lusitanian banishment unexpectedly provided this louche and lackadaisical dandiprat with a springboard for empire.