Better One for All — AD 69 I: You Don’t Buy Soldiers
How do we know what happened at Brixellum? This time not only from books. Suetonius’s father, Suetonius Laetus, served in this war as a tribune of the Thirteenth Legion. That is the legion that scattered under the enemy’s charge at Bedriacum. His son later wrote down his stories.
Now Otho has a choice Galba never had. With him he has fresh cohorts that have not yet fought. The legions from Moesia are already at Aquileia, and more are coming from Dalmatia and Pannonia. Those beaten at Bedriacum want revenge. The soldiers clasp his knees. The praetorian prefect Plotius Firmus pleads most fervently: he must not abandon so loyal an army.
Earlier that day Otho had also spoken with his nephew, a frightened youth. Tacitus recorded his last advice: “Never forget entirely, and never remember too well, that Otho was your uncle.”
At dawn on April 16, AD 69, Otho takes his own life. He was thirty-six. By Dio’s count he was eleven days short of his thirty-seventh birthday. He ruled for about ninety days; Suetonius counts ninety-five.
He was buried quickly, as he had asked. The tomb is modest. Plutarch later saw it in Brixellum and copied the inscription: “To the memory of Marcus Otho.”
In his speech to the soldiers Otho named the heroes who gave their lives for Rome. He preferred to be like Curtius, Dio wrote, rather than like Marius or Sulla. Three months earlier Galba had died by the Lacus Curtius, the lake that bears Curtius’s name.
The soldiers at Brixellum try once more. They go to the house of Verginius Rufus, who was in Otho’s camp, and offer him the purple again. According to Plutarch, he answered that it would be madness to accept after a defeat what he had refused after a victory. Verginius slips out through the back door. Once again he does not want to become emperor.
The ancient writers cannot make up their minds about Otho. Plutarch notes that he lived no better than Nero. Suetonius adds that many of those who hated him in life praised him after his death. Tacitus puts it most briefly.
The disgraceful deed is the coup against Galba. By the glorious one Tacitus means his end. Let us remember the decision that preceded it: Otho still had an army and would rather Romans stopped dying for him.
In Rome the games in honor of Ceres are under way. Messengers burst into the theater: Otho is dead, and the army in the city has already sworn allegiance to Vitellius. The audience applauds the new name. Then people do something strange. They carry images of Galba, wreathed in laurel and flowers, around the temples. At the Lacus Curtius, where he died, they build a mound of wreaths.
Galba was right about the soldiers and lost, because he had neither money nor tact. Otho lived like Nero, and ended the war in such a way that even those who hated him praised him.
In the next episode: The victor is still in Gaul. He is the son of the courtier who once convinced the Senate that Claudius could marry his niece. When he reaches the battlefield at Bedriacum, he will say a sentence that Suetonius will record for the ages. And in Rome a feast will begin.