The Twelve Caesars (34 page)

Otho’s war record fails to impress. On balance the arena of war was not the ideal environment for this emperor preoccupied with the softness of his skin and the sleek
alignment of a toupee which, commended for its verisimilitude by Suetonius, in surviving portraiture resembles nothing so much as a crocheted tea-cosy. Emperor in the interests of self-fulfilment,
Otho possessed neither experience of military campaigning nor any connection with the troops beyond his ability to pay their wages.
In this, too, he represents a departure
for the principate to date. Unfortunately for Otho, inexperience and unsuitability were not enough to stem the tides of war. For his efforts on the campaign trail, he would afterwards be rewarded
in Juvenal’s
Satires
with unflattering comparisons with Cleopatra.
²¹

At first, it seems, Otho had doubted war’s inevitability. His initial response to news of Vitellius’ revolt had been a deputation from the senate instructed to inform the insurgents
that a new emperor had already been chosen and that peaceable acquiescence represented the wiser course. Predictably it fell flat. Otho then opened a correspondence with Vitellius, in which emperor
offered to buy off would-be emperor and, in Suetonius’ version, enter into a tentative power-sharing arrangement. Vitellius’ reply made a similar offer to Otho, at which point their
communication degenerated into an undignified exchange of insults – ‘foolish and ridiculous’, as Plutarch points out, since one stormed the other with reproaches applicable to
both, chief among them their common unsuitability to reign.
²²
In March, with no alternative in sight and, in Tacitus’ account, mindful that delay had hastened Nero’s downfall, Otho left
Rome for a head-on collision with Vitellius’ men in northern Italy.

Suetonius devotes less space to the brief campaign in which Otho was defeated (although this constitutes the major event of his principate) than to the consequences of that defeat. There is a
workaday quality to his report, as if the portents which attended Otho’s departure render further explanation superfluous. The emperor’s leave-taking was double-damned: he embarked when
the sacred shields had been removed from the Temple of Mars, during the days of mourning which commenced the festival of Cybele, both alike inauspicious. Added to religious proscriptions was the
meteorological glitch of the Tiber in flood.
Otho’s route out of Rome, which took him across the Campus Martius and eventually along the Via Flaminia, was blocked by
fallen buildings: risen to unprecedented heights, the river had broken its banks, engulfing not only the city’s poorer, low-lying districts but areas usually reckoned safe from flooding.
Tacitus and Plutarch add to this potent mix a statue of Julius Caesar revolving on its pedestal on an island in the Tiber so that it pointed not west but east, and the sudden, spine-chilling
phenomenon, in the porch of the Temple of Jupiter, of Victory, mounted in a chariot, dropping the chariot’s reins ‘as if she had not power to hold them’.
²³
In Etruria, ancestral
homeland of the Othones, an ox spoke aloud, its unexpected utterance undoubtedly a litany of peril.

Aided by a clutch of generals – some said too many – Otho had not been entirely lax in his preparations. Assistance was promised in the form of the seven legions of Dalmatia,
Pannonia and Moesia: these troops had already embarked on the long journey west. In Rome, sketchy training programmes sought belatedly to ready that rag-tag agglomeration of fighting men which was
Otho’s inheritance from the war-shunning Nero, men more used to ‘spectacles and festivals and plays’ than military manoeuvres, according to Plutarch.
²⁴
In addition, 2,000 gladiators
had been conscripted in the emperor’s cause. Vitellius remained in Germany awaiting further recruits. Active leadership of his campaign belonged to Valens and Caecina. Too late now for
Otho’s men to close the Alpine passes: the horse had already bolted. Instead, the Othonians decided to create a defensive frontier along the line of the river Po. It was here, heedless of
omens, flushed with victory in a clutch of minor skirmishes and too hasty to await the arrival of first reinforcements from the East, that Otho gave the order for engagement. On 14 April, dizzy
with the conflicting advice of his generals, he urged
immediate battle. We know for ourselves the outcome.

Plutarch attributes this tactical failure on Otho’s part to a crisis of nerves, and quotes the emperor’s secretary, a rhetorician called Secundus:

It was the same instinct which prompts men to stake everything on the fall of a card, that fecklessness and daring which, so recently, had won for Otho an empire.

Nothing in that first defeat gave grounds for hopelessness, but Otho’s mind was made up. In Suetonius’ account, his decision to commit suicide rather than further
endanger Roman lives was immediate. He did not despair of success in the long run, nor did he mistrust his forces soon to be augmented with the legions of the East. Unusually among Rome’s
emperors he had no appetite for blood or the loss of life. ‘Wanton Otho still could win the day,’ Martial wrote afterwards. ‘But cursing war with all its price of blood, He
pierced his heart and perished as he stood.’
²⁶
He had not led his troops at Bedriacum. Earlier he had won golden words by his presence among his men on the march north: acerbic commentators
observed his eleventh-hour disdain for his usually stringent grooming regime. But at the crucial battle he had remained safely to the rear in his
camp at Brixellum (modern
Brescello). Sound tactics, it was a miscall in terms of morale-boosting and leadership. He would make no such mistakes in death.

Perhaps it was the troops which were the problem. A principate without military support was untenable. But a principate whose only justification was its thraldom to its troops was equally so.
For events in Rome had already exposed the hollowness of the charade even before campaigning began. They took the form of an incident interpreted by Suetonius as proof of the affection and loyalty
of the Praetorian Guard towards their Caesar. Suetonius glosses over the extent to which that affection and loyalty, in this case spurs to lawlessness, made Otho their puppet and their victim.

A plan to transport troops from their station at Ostia to Rome also involved transportation of military equipment. Unexpectedly, the decision of the commanding officer to begin the process at
night, under cover of partial darkness, led to a misapprehension that the real plan was not the safe carriage of arms and armour to the capital but a full-scale coup orchestrated by the senate for
Otho’s overthrow. At a gallop, outraged Praetorians made for the imperial palace where Otho was hosting a banquet for eighty leading senators and their wives. The result was temporary
anarchy.

For the Praetorians the emperor’s banquet provided an ideal opportunity to eliminate all Otho’s enemies at a sitting. For the senate, the emperor’s perfidy in bringing them
together only to kill them exceeded the worst affronts of recent history. For Otho, confused, uncertain and dashed by twin loyalties, it was a graphic illustration of the true nature of the balance
of power in his relationship with his personal fighting force. He hastened the senators out of the palace by unfrequented passages. Then, as soldiers stormed the palace, he begged their
cooperation with arguments, entreaties and, at last, when no other course prevailed, tears.

Like so much in this year of upheavals and bogus emperors, it was a night of hair-raising indignity. Ill discipline came close to destroying the senate and the emperor’s authority was
exposed as non-existent. Otho’s recourse had been the woman’s part of crying. It surely unnerved him. It may too have sickened him. It was an ominous preliminary to civil war.

On the eve of death, a leave-taking. Otho’s brother, his nephew and his friends, Suetonius tells us. Plutarch awards the honours to his nephew Cocceius, ‘who was
still a youth’, and whom Otho had intended to adopt as his heir following victory over Vitellius. From uncle to nephew a final imprecation: ‘Do not altogether forget, and do not too
well remember, that you had a Caesar for an uncle.’
²⁷
At one level a statement of that moderation which had characterized Otho’s brief supremacy, it was also by way of apology. An
admission that Otho’s was a principate without legitimacy, justified neither by birth nor even by merit: no grounds for revenge. It had been an exercise in opportunism. A grand, inglorious
gamble – reason in the future for family pride – it appeared in the light of defeat too flimsy and unfounded to inspire further bloodshed of the sort Otho meant to avert through his
death.

Cocceius dispatched, Otho sought out a quiet, private place in which to write letters. He wrote only two. The first addressed his sister, intended to lessen her sorrow. Otho’s second
letter was directed to Statilia Messalina, the noblewoman whom Nero had chosen as his third wife after the death of Poppaea and a long-standing affair. Curly-haired, pale-cheeked, with an
overwhelming appearance of resignation both in the Capitoline Museums’ contemporary bust and in a sixteenth-century image by the Mantuan painter Teodoro Ghisi, Messalina had
been chosen by Otho to be entrusted with his corpse. More than that, his memory. For it was Nero’s widow Messalina, Suetonius tells us, whom this ambitious one-time coxcomb and former husband
of Poppaea had chosen to marry had he lived.

Vitellius
: Male bust representing the emperor Vitellius © Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikipedia Commons