Bedriacum

A village between Verona and Cremona. Tacitus writes that it became notorious for two Roman disasters (Histories 2.23). In mid-April AD 69 the army of Vitellius defeated Otho’s forces here. Suetonius records an omen: before the battle two eagles fought above the field, and the winner was driven off by a third that came from the east. Fewer than forty days later Vitellius rode across a field full of unburied bodies. According to Suetonius he remarked that a dead enemy smelled good and a dead citizen even better; Tacitus describes the visit without those words. The second battle, also called the battle of Cremona, was fought in the autumn of the same year: the legions of Antonius Primus crushed the army of Vitellius. The place appears in both AD 69 episodes.