A Feast and a New Guard — AD 69 II: The Capitol in Flames

Vitellius does not intend to wait for the Guard to set its sights on him. While still in Gaul he disbands all the praetorian cohorts with a single edict. He orders them to hand their weapons to the tribunes. He tracks down a hundred and twenty men by name: petitions to Otho asking for a reward for killing Galba had been found. They go to their deaths. Suetonius rarely praises him, but here he writes that these deeds gave hope of a great ruler. (Suet. Vit. 10.1; Tac. 2.67)

Sixty thousand soldiers then march through Italy. Behind them come even more camp followers and servants, plus actors and charioteers from the circus — all of Nero’s court. The grain stands ripe in the fields, so the army plunders it as if in enemy territory. Vitellius wants to ride into Rome on horseback, in a general’s cloak and with a sword at his side. His friends stop him: that is how one enters a captured city, not one’s own capital. He changes his clothes. So Tacitus writes. Suetonius claims he did enter in a general’s cloak, to the sound of trumpets. (Tac. 2.71, 2.87, 2.89; Suet. Vit. 11.1)

In Rome he builds the Guard anew: sixteen praetorian cohorts and four urban ones, a thousand men each. He draws twenty thousand legionaries from the Rhine into them. Any man who wishes may join. Tacitus writes that this was how the old glory of the praetorian camp was lost. And Otho’s disbanded Praetorians scatter across Italy without weapons but with a grudge. When a new emperor rises in the East, they will return to the standards. On his side. (Tac. 2.93–94, 2.67, 2.82)

On the Capitol he embraces his mother and gives her the title of Augusta. Sextilia, a woman of the old stamp, cannot take joy in it. When she received her first letter from her son, she answered curtly: “I gave birth to a Vitellius, not a Germanicus.” (Tac. 2.64, 2.89; Dio 65.4.5)

Vitellius, now pontifex maximus, issues an edict on rites. The date: July 18. Rome freezes. It is the anniversary of the disaster at the Allia, after which the Gauls took the city. A day cursed for centuries, and the new emperor gave it no thought. Instead, on the Campus Martius he offers sacrifices to Nero’s spirit. At a banquet he orders a flute player to play “something from the Master’s book” and is the first to applaud Nero’s song. (Tac. 2.91, 2.95; Suet. Vit. 11.2)

He can also surprise with mildness. In the Senate Helvidius Priscus opposes him. In anger the emperor summons the tribunes but does nothing more. Afterward he says: no wonder two senators disagree, he himself often argued with Thrasea. The Senate laughs at the comparison. He is less mild with astrologers: he orders them out of Italy before October 1. A reply appears in the city at once, signed “the Chaldeans”: before that same day Vitellius Germanicus will no longer be among the living. Cassius Dio assures us that the astrologers got the day exactly right. (Tac. 2.91; Dio 65.7.2; Suet. Vit. 14.4; Dio 65.1.4)

Now for the table. Vitellius eats three, sometimes four times a day: breakfast, lunch, dinner and a nighttime drinking bout. Emetics make it possible. For each meal he invites himself to a different person’s house. None costs the host less than four hundred thousand sesterces. His brother welcomes him to Rome with a dinner at which, reportedly, two thousand fish and seven thousand birds were served. (Suet. Vit. 13.1–2)

The emperor outdoes him. He dedicates a platter so huge that he calls it the Shield of Minerva, Defender of the City. Into it go pike livers, pheasant and peacock brains, flamingo tongues and lamprey milt. Ships bring them from across the empire, from Parthia to the Strait of Gibraltar. Cassius Dio describes a dish of the tongues, brains and livers of fish and birds that cost a million sesterces: no clay platter could be made so large, so it was cast in silver. It was not melted down until Emperor Hadrian. (Suet. Vit. 13.2; Dio 65.3.3)

Even Nero’s Golden House strikes Vitellius and his wife Galeria as too modest. And yet Tacitus holds up Galeria and Sextilia as models: they took no part in the cruelties of the court. (Dio 65.4.1–2; Tac. 2.64)

While the Shield of Minerva was being set on the table in Rome, in Alexandria they had long been swearing allegiance to someone else.